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Luigi Ghirri, The Idea of Building is a deluxe catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, curated by painter Matt Connors, at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, in October of 2020. Cloth bound, with a dust jacket, this beautiful and oversized 83 paged book, printed in a limited edition of 500, presents all twenty nine Ghirri photographs featured in the sequence of the original exhibition.

Both exhibition and book focus on Ghirri's vision of the material built-ness of reality, and thus of any representations of that reality, as Connors states in the introduction;

"Ghirri was closely aligned with the Conceptual art practices of his time, but his process of re-materialization presents a different path, a counterpoint to his peers’ strategies of dematerialization, though still aimed squarely at reframing the lived-in world. In his photographs — with their repeated and layered conjurings of built structure, supports and surfaces interacting and swapping places, textiles confounding image with surface, landscapes rhyming with architecture, and music and speech made visible —
the immaterial is materialized."

Many of the photos in The Idea of Building are reproduced at actual scale. Also included are twenty images of related, rarely reproduced ephemera from the Ghirri studio. A three image gatefold as well as a poster-sized four page fold out make this a truly unique and bespoke book/object. An essential addition to the Ghirri bibliography.