Luigi Ghirri’s ‘Felicità’ frames a new way of looking

At Thomas Dane Gallery in St James’s, Luigi Ghirri: Felicità (23 January–9 May 2026) presents a rare and contemplative photography exhibition in which felicity emerges through the act of seeing rather than as an emotion to be possessed. Spanning the gallery’s two Duke Street spaces, the show reveals Ghirri as an artist whose work cultivates attention, inviting viewers to experience the subtle joy found in careful observation and the rhythms of perception itself.

Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino: curatorial approach of restraint

Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, Felicità avoids the conventions of a retrospective. Instead of spotlighting Ghirri’s most recognisable images, the curators draw extensively from lesser-known and previously unpublished works, allowing a quieter internal logic to guide the exhibition. Their method is deliberately non-didactic: images are placed in conversation through rhythm and juxtaposition rather than explanatory framing, encouraging viewers to experience photography as a perceptual practice rather than a sequence of statements.

Surface, signs, and the act of looking

The first gallery foregrounds Ghirri’s early investigations into surface and representation. Small-scale photographs from the early 1970s—walls, signs, fragments of sky, muted planes of colour—strip the Italian landscape of nostalgia and cliché. These works resist narrative closure, instead insisting on attention itself as a form of felicity. Signs point nowhere, horizons collapse into colour fields, and depth gives way to surface, revealing Ghirri’s conviction that photography should slow perception rather than dramatise it.

Photography as an environment

In the second space, interiors and landscapes extend this enquiry. Wallpapers flatten domestic rooms into graphic compositions; posters, mirrors and atlases turn photography into an image of image culture itself. Later landscapes from the 1980s introduce brighter colour without sentimentality, presenting a world shaped by coexistence rather than opposition. Across both galleries, Ghirri’s photographs suggest that meaning lies not in resolution but in sustained looking.

A landmark among photography exhibitions in London

By privileging restraint over spectacle, Luigi Ghirri: Felicità positions photography as an ethical and perceptual act—one grounded in modesty, precision and care. In an era of visual excess, this exhibition offers a rare pause, reaffirming Ghirri’s relevance not as a nostalgic figure but as an artist whose ideas feel urgently contemporary.