La Galleria Gracis presents OBIETTIVO, ARTE POVERA. A journey through art from 1968, a solo exhibition by photographer Paolo Mussat Sartor (Torino, 1947) that through his photographs tells the story of Arte Povera and the international scene of modern and contemporary art around the 1970s, offering a critical reading of the artists’ work that goes beyond mere storytelling and becomes an authentic, vibrant testimony of that heroic era.
Paolo Mussat Sartor was born in Turin in 1947, where he lives and works. Self-taught, he began photographing in 1966. In 1968 he started collaborating with Gian Enzo Sperone and began to photograph Italian and international artists who exhibited in his gallery during those years. He published Ritratti di Artisti and documentation of works in art catalogs and specialized magazines worldwide. He also contributed to art and architecture journals such as Domus, Abitare, Vogue, Casa Vogue, and Ottagono. In 1979, Stampatori published Paolo Mussat Sartor Fotografo 1968/1978. Arte e Artisti in Italia, a book documenting ten years of collaboration with Italian contemporaries. Since 1970, he has pursued his own photographic research language. From 1985 he added color pigments and mixed media to his prints, creating unique, one-of-a-kind pieces.
The exhibition’s title encapsulates the keywords that serve as the project’s throughline. OBIETTIVO reflects the camera’s gaze merging with Sartor’s own view of reality. VIAGGI evokes the series of photographs taken from the car’s interior during the 1970s to the 1990s, when he traversed Europe to document exhibitions and artists.
At Galleria Gracis, around 30 images by Mussat Sartor will be on view, featuring the major figures of Arte Povera and their works, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis, Luciano Fabro, Eliseo Mattiacci, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Emilio Prini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio, and a substantial set of photographs from the Viaggi series. More than a portrait gallery, the photographs will dialogue with the works of the same artists he photographed, closing the circle on the exhibition’s third axis: ART POVERA.
Sartor began his career as a photographer at Gian Enzo Sperone’s gallery in Turin, his hometown, during the peak years from 1968 to 1975, thanks to his friend Tucci Russo who introduced him to the milieu.
Andrea Bellini, in the volume Paolo Mussat Sartor: Luoghi d’Arte e di artisti 1968–2008, notes how little the photographer was drawn to the art world’s salon culture, and how his curiosity, eye, and instinct remained focused on the artwork and the artists’ language.
Sartor did not use a wide-angle lens, did not alter or judge what he photographed, and perhaps for this reason forged a respectful and understanding rapport with the artists, as he himself explained: “It was a ‘reasoned’ photography, aiming to reflect the idea of the work. This holds true in all my photographs, from portraits to landscapes: I strive to respect the subject, to maintain a mental dialog with what I photograph, to understand without sensationalizing, without overturning, without pushing beyond.”
This is why Galleria Gracis has chosen to pair his photographs of Arte Povera’s protagonists with the Viaggi images, exhibited here for the first time. Most were shot with Minox, a pocket-sized camera he always carried, enabling long journeys across Europe—from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, Paris to Basel, then Rome and Bari. Objects, situations, weather changes—all pared down to essentials, captured after careful observation and reflection.
Galleria Gracis is pleased to dedicate a second solo show to Paolo Mussat Sartor, following the success of Inattese Visioni (2023), which presented his photographs enriched with painterly interventions, continuing a path of valorization and deepening of his artistic language.
Regarded as one of the most significant art photographers of the late 20th century, Mussat Sartor helped shape a formative vision of how contemporary art history is transmitted. His photographs continue to be exhibited in international museums and exhibitions, as living memory and an integral part of the extraordinary era that began in the 1970s.
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