Artist

Gian Paolo Minelli

Curator

Laura Buccellato

"Thirty years ago, at the age of 27, Gian Paolo Minelli arrived on the silvery shores of the River Plate, driven by an urgency to explore and understand a new territory. With a camera as his sole instrument, he began what would become a sustained engagement with the local art scene in Buenos Aires, becoming both witness and interpreter of its protagonists during the second half of the 20th century. This exhibition presents previously unseen works from Minelli’s archive, offering an intimate perspective on a formative period in his career. 

This is an exploration that seeks to comprehend another reality; one as familiar as it is foreign. Through a time anchored in the 1990s, he documents encounters with selected artists from various generations, his contemporaries. He visits and observes them within the urban landscape, where each artist becomes both subject and conduit, opening a space that feels simultaneously known and unfamiliar. Through these urban wanderings, a sense of transcendent intimacy emerges, sometimes perceived, sometimes intuited.

A tireless wanderer, his photographic practice astonishes the observer in its ability to distill, in a single instant, the revealing gesture of a subject’s inner world. Bathed in the light of their surroundings, his images speak a language born of the silent dialogue unfolding between both artists. The visual language Gian Paolo weaves intertwines with that of his subjects, each maintaining its distinct voice within a gentle symbiosis, most vividly felt in his startling scenes of night and day. Through the framing of each image, attentive to the smallest detail of his subjects and their expression, he evokes a mood that belongs both to a fleeting moment and to the spirit of its time. With the sensibility of a poet and the boldness of a true translator, he captures some thirty artists—among them Pablo Suárez, Marta Minujín, Pablo Siquier, Marcelo Pombo, and Miguel Harte—rendering them in another language, the poetry of image" - Laura Buccellato.

Gian Paolo Minelli

Born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1968, Gian Paolo Minelli has lived and worked in Buenos Aires since 1999, while maintaining regular ties to Switzerland. His photographic practice, centered on what he terms "photographic essays", reflects a sustained inquiry into the forms, rhythms, and social dynamics of urban space. Rather than a simple sequence of images, these essays are conceived as a visual explorations of ideas and environments.

In Buenos Aires, Minelli has developed a number of significant photographic series, including Cárcel de Caseros (2000–2002), Galpón Colón (2004–2005), Playas (2004–2008), Zona sur (2000–2010), La Boca (2014–2018), and Aridez (2020–2024). Each of these bodies of work reflects a distinct approach to the Argentine urban landscape, foregrounding themes of architecture, memory, marginality, and spatial transformation.

Minelli was awarded the Swiss Art Awards prize in 2008, having previously been granted the applied arts prize bestowed by the Swiss Secretariat for Culture in 1996, 1999, and 2002. His career includes several international artist residencies, from the Swiss Institute in Rome (1998–1999) to the Cité internationale des arts in Paris (2009–2010), and the Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr in Berlin (2012).

He has held solo exhibitions at museums, contemporary art centers, and galleries across the globe, and has participated in over eighty group exhibitions in cities including Buenos Aires, Rosario, São Paulo, Basel, Zurich, Geneva, Rotterdam, Krakow, Turin, Rome, Liverpool, Hamamatsu, New York, Miami, Bogotá, and Mexico City.

Between 2016 and 2018, Minelli took part in the Critical Collaboration project at New York University, organized jointly by the Department of Art & Public Policy, The Tisch Initiative for Creative Research, and the Global Institute for Advanced Study.

He has edited and published numerous photographic books, among them Zona sur, barrio Piedra Buena, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001–2006 (2007), Cárcel de Caseros 2000–2002 (2003), Transfer (1999), Buenos Aires: encuentro con treinta artistas (1997), and Notturni (1997). In 2010, he released The Skin of the Cities / La piel de las ciudades, a ten-year retrospective of his photographic work, curated by Tobia Bezzola and published by Codax and JRP|Ringier (Zurich).

Minelli is currently based in Buenos Aires, where he serves as both artist and coordinator of the Casa Suiza de La Boca artist residency program.

Laura Buccellato

Art critic and historian. Laura Buccellato has held key positions in Argentina’s cultural institutions, including that of advisor to the Centro Cultural Kirchner (CCK); general coordinator of the Audiovisual Cooperation Unit at the Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires; director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA); deputy cultural director of the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana (ICI) of Spain; curator and advisor in the visual arts department at the Centro Cultural de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires; and artistic director of Art Gallery Internacional–Víctor Najmías from 1967 to 1978.

Since 2021, she has served as advisor to the Andreani Foundation.

She is the author of catalogue-books on artists such as Alberto Heredia, Margarita Paksa, Marie Orensanz, and Eduardo Costa, among others.

Buccellato has curated more than 350 exhibitions in Argentina and internationally. Notable international projects include Alberto Greco at IVAM, Valencia (1991); Antonio Berni: Historia de dos personajes: Juanito Laguna y Ramona Montiel at Fundación Telefónica, Spain (1995); and Mondongo at MAXXI, Rome (2016).

The exhibition 1995 Archives is supported by Bodega Catena Zapata and Sinteplast.