Luca Pizzaroni

Through his work in fashion, Luca Pizzaroni investigates the urban paradigm that supports his industry. His process of photodocumenting various city patterns has resulted in three key volumes of work: “Landlord Series,” “Avenue of America series,” and the “Labels Project.” All three were collectively exhibited under the title KRADA for his first Fred Torres exhibition in 2009. With sharp attention to the obvious but often ignored details of metropolitan culture, Pizzaroni scans the movements between people, their materialistic whims, the fragile financial
market—in short, the aggressive, insidious theater that is the City.

It is as though he is slowly collecting the scenes, props, and pieces of the set for a film. In this film vendors sell knock-off purses and a man claims his piece of the city sidewalk to make a bed. There is a scene that offers a daunting geography lesson via the labels on shirts. As of yet, he is only missing 22 countries in this survey that will result in photographs of labels from every country in the world. For Pizzaroni the clothing rack is a sculpture that highlights the discrepancies between consumer image and practice, between the pretense of luxury and the standards of production.

Luca Pizzaroni has exhibited both in New York and abroad including shows at KunstWerke in Berlin and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. He is the recipient of a residency at American Apparel and a grant from the Italian Institute of Culture of New York. His film and video career has included directorial work with both Elton John and Bryan Adams. In collaboration with Florian Böhm and Wolfgang Scheppe, he produced ENDCOMMERCIAL®, a definitive catalog of his visual, urban studies. The book was published in 2002 to wide acclaim.