About this artwork
The European architectural views by Lewis Baltz, made around 1990, differ strikingly from the bleak landscapes that cemented his reputation in the mid-1970s, when he emerged as part of the New Topographics movement. These more recent works introduce an off-center vantage point, color, great size, and an emphatic sense of time’s passage, evident in the form of blurred taillights and other atmospheric inclusions. Motivating these changes was Baltz’s growing interest in public space as regulated by private development and governmental control: for example, the proliferation of outdoor surveillance cameras (the elevated view here mimics that seen through such devices). Piazza Pugliesi—a place that does not exist under that name but could be located in Puglia or somewhere else in Southern Italy—offers a model view of a denatured terrain.
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Status
- Currently Off View
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Department
- Photography and Media
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Artist
- Lewis Baltz
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Title
- Piazza Pugliesi, from the series "Italian Night Color Work"
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Place
- United States (Artist's nationality:)
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Date
- Made 1991
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Medium
- Silver dye-bleach print
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Dimensions
- 243.9 × 127 cm (96 × 50 in.)
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Credit Line
- Gift of Michael Rubel
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Reference Number
- 2013.1461