Bruno Marina Gallery is delighted to present Villa Doria Pamphili, an exhibition of photography by Vivien Bittencourt, with accompanying texts and poetry by Vincent Katz.

The Villa Doria Pamphili photographs present an example of Bittencourt’s dialogue with nature, particularly how nature is envisioned and experienced in a contemporary urban environment. The expansive Villa Doria Pamphili park on Rome’s Gianicolo hill is comparable in size to New York’s Central Park, and it is much used and beloved by the surrounding community. Yet these photographs maintain an almost total exclusion of human figures — we feel we are walking through a place that has the power of a sacred grove. In Bittencourt’s photographs, taken in different seasons and at different times of day, we sense the motion of the trees, be it a subtle movement caused by a breeze, or the more rarefied movement of the trees through years and decades. The texts by Vincent Katz were written as thoughts that might have been had while walking through the Villa’s grounds and will be applied to the gallery walls in pencil, as a kind of ephemeral commentary on the situation in which the photographs were made.

Also on view will be Bittencourt’s photographic portraits of artists, notable for the intimacy she achieves. Many were done for such publications as Folha de São Paulo, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, and Art On Paper. Bittencourt has created compelling portraits of Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Francesco Clemente, Allen Ginsberg, Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne, Kiki Smith, among many others.

Bittencourt has also made video documentaries on the artists Rudy Burckhardt, Red Grooms, and Alex Katz, and several videos using poetry. She made two videos of plays by Kenneth Koch and one of an historic reading of authors from the Hanuman Books series, edited by Clemente and Raymond Foye. Her recently completed video on Burckhardt was shown at the 22nd International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal in March of 2004, and won the “Best of Festival” award in the Arts category at the Berkley Film and Video Festival, October, 2004. She is currently working on a video about Kiki Smith. Bittencourt was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, where she received a B.A. in History from the University of São Paulo. She moved to New York in 1986, where she lives today.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He has published several books of poetry in collaboration with artists, including Rudy Burckhardt, Alex Katz, and Tabboo!, and an artist's book in two volumes with James Brown. He has curated exhibitions of the work of Rudy Burckhardt for IVAM in Valencia, Spain, and the Grey Art Gallery in New York. He wrote the essay and interview for the first study of Francesco Clemente's portraits, and is the editor and one of the authors of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT, 2002). His most recent book is a comprehensive translation from Latin of the poems of ancient Roman poet Sextus Propertius (c. 55 to 16 BC), who perfected the Latin love elegy (Princeton, 2004).



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