CENTRO PECCI exhibitions

Peter Hujar

Performance and Portraiture / Italian Journeys

Curated by Grace Deveney with Stefano Collicelli Cagol

14 December 2024 – 11 May 2025

Opening: 13 December 2024, h 6pm

“I keep hoping that when I do a picture, it has its own life that really has nothing to do with that moment. It’s not something frozen. It’s the echo of that time; and that what’s on that piece of paper has its own life. Which is very different than the life that was, in the moment that the picture was taken.”  —Peter Hujar

Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci is pleased to present Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture / Italian Journeys, opening on 13 December 2024. Co-curated by Grace Deveney, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, director at Centro Pecci, the exhibition brings together 20 photographs from Hujar’s journeys in Italy, which took place between the 1950s and the 1970s and 39 photographs of participants in the eclectic performance scene emerging in Lower Manhattan in the 1970s.

While photography has long been associated with documentation and memory, Peter Hujar (1934–1987) sought to produce images that construct a new reality through subtle exchanges between himself and his subjects. He created direct yet enigmatic portraits of the figures he came across in his travels, pictures of his close friends and contemporaries, and sexually charged male nudes in close dialogue with the performance and movement study scene emerging in New York’s East Village in the 1970s.

The selection of photographs from Hujar’s Italian journeys brings together an unexpected vision of the country, which was transforming itself from the post-war period up to the economic boom and beyond. Hujar travelled to Italy several times from the 1950s to the 1970s. During these decades, he had the opportunity to visit cities including Florence, Sperlonga, Palermo, and Naples. During these journeys, he observed the complexity of the country. The works on view provide an overview of Hujar’s understanding of Italian landscapes, animals and humans; a mutual dialogue with what was in front of him as much as seen in his photographs of performance and portraiture.

With his photographs of corpses interred at the catacombs in Palermo, Hujar captured the attempt to preserve the appearance of life in death; an interest that would pervade his future work. He developed a darkroom technique that expressed his desire to bridge opposites; he carefully drew forth the mid-tones—the rich and varied shades of grey—in his black-and-white photographs. Hujar sought to create what he called “a new life” with each print he made. In this aspiration, he rejected conventional associations of photography with documentation—the idea that a picture freezes a moment in time. To further this aim, he depicted his subjects in fleeting states that appear on the verge of changing—an uncommon approach in portraiture. His sitters often seem lost in thought, for example, or on the verge of sliding into a state of reverie or altered consciousness as they recline.

In the early 1970s, Hujar was living in a loft in lower Manhattan as, nearby, Robert Wilson founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance group dedicated to exploring new approaches to theatre and choreography. Byrd Hoffman is just one of the groups Hujar would go on to photograph extensively, along with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, an absurdist project founded by Charles Ludlam, and The Cockettes, a psychedelic theatre troupe based in San Francisco. Hujar photographed performances by these companies but often paid more attention to capturing the actors and dancers backstage, in moments of transition—as they put on their costumes and make-up, preparing to embody the characters they would play.

Hujar frequently photographed dancers and artists developing new approaches to movement. Many of these individuals, even those who were classically trained, incorporated everyday gestures into their choreography to bridge the gap between routine movement and performance, or to challenge the hierarchies that separated ballet, theatre, and popular culture. Such liminality was fertile ground for many of the performers that Hujar photographed, who broke down the boundaries between art and life, between male and female, and between other normative, binary categories.

This exhibition connects the experimental dialogue between Hujar and his subjects and the new realities they each created—whether through photographs or performance. The presentation at Centro Pecci includes 59 works by Hujar, and in keeping with the spirit of collaboration and exchange that characterises his work, also includes a video work by Sheryl Sutton, and three works by David Wojnarowicz, two of the artists and performers in his circle. The show is part of Centro Pecci’s Tuscany at the Center annual programme, and will be on view alongside Louis Fratino. Satura and Margherita Manzelli. Le signorine.

Exhibition Sponsor: Enrico Pecci di Alberto Pecci & C.
Thanks to: the founding members of the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci

Thanks to: LarioReti

About Peter Hujar

Peter Hujar (b. 1934, Trenton, New Jersey) died of AIDS related complications in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. Hujar’s photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam for a retrospective in 1994. Exhibited and organised by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid starting in 2017, the exhibition Speed of Life made its final stop at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France in 2019. In 2024, the Peter Hujar Foundation presented Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death during the Venice Biennale. His work remains in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, the Tate, London, and the Reina Sofía, Madrid.

Cover: Peter Hujar, Orgasmic Man, 1969  20 x 16 in. © The Peter Hujar Archive/Artists Rights Society (Ars), Ny