Giulietta Masina at the Rome subway station, Paris, 1956, from negative 6x6 cm Agnès Varda, Giulietta Masina at the Rome subway station, Paris, 1956, from negative 6x6 cm © Succession Agnès Varda - Fonds Agnès Varda déposé à l'Institut pour la photographie
Villa Medici, Rome, Italy
https://villamedici.it/programme/agnes-varda/
Villa Medici will be honouring the photographic work of the artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928-2019) with her first major retrospective in Italy, as well as marking the 70th anniversary of the twinning agreement between Paris and Rome.
The exhibition invites us to immerse ourselves in postwar Paris, and more specifically in the courtyard-studio on Rue Daguerre, where Agnès Varda lived, created, and experimented for nearly seven decades, a place inseparable from her work. Her years in Paris are complemented by the photographs she took on her travels in Italy, from Venice to Rome, in Renaissance villas and gardens, or on film sets. Through the places and figures that inspired her, this retrospective traces the career path of a prolific and remarkable artist. Her work will also be the subject of another show in Italy at the Galleria Modernissimo of the Cineteca di Bologna. Entitled Viva Varda (March 6, 2026-February 7, 2027), this exhibition, held in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Française and Ciné-Tamaris, will explore the entire body of work of the first female director to be awarded an honorary Oscar for her career achievement.
Agnès Varda's Paris
The exhibition at Villa Medici juxtaposes and compares the work of the photographer with that of the filmmaker through a series of 130 original prints, film clips, publications, documents, posters, on-set photographs, and objects that belonged to the artist. Designed by the Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris and Paris Musées, under the direction of Anne de Mondenard and Paris Musées, it was presented in Paris from April 9 to August 24, 2025. The retrospective is the result of more than two years of research and draws on the Agnès Varda photographic collection, as well as the archives of Ciné-Tamaris, the production company she created, now run by her children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy.
The walkthrough traces Agnès Varda's beginnings as a photographer and how she settled, in the early 1950s, in the courtyard-workshop on Rue Daguerre, which became a shooting studio, a photo lab and the venue for her first exhibition in 1954. This courtyard, later shared with her partner, the filmmaker Jacques Demy, became the beating heart of her world. Photographs and film clips emphasize the offbeat gaze, tinged with humour and strangeness, that she brought to bear on the streets of the capital and its inhabitants. Through cinematic works such as Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) or Daguerreotypes (1975), the retrospective particularly highlights her constant attention to women and to people living on the margins of society.
The exhibition includes works by several artists presented in dialogue with Agnès Varda's photographs and films: Giancarlo Botti, Michaële Buisson, Alexander Calder, Martine Franck, Dominique Genty, JR, Liliane de Kermadec, Michèle Laurent, Claude Nori, Laurent Sully-Jaulmes, Robert Picard, Valentine Schlegel, Collier Schorr.
Curator: Anne de Mondenard, Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris.
With the exceptional collaboration of Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris, Paris Musées and Rosalie Varda.
Agnès Varda's Italy
The continuation of the exhibition designed by the Carnavalet Museum, Italy, illuminates the ties between Agnès Varda and Italy through a selection of unpublished photographs taken by the artist during two visits to that country, in 1959 and 1963. At the time, she was known as a theatre photographer and fulfilled numerous commissions to produce features for the French and European press.
In 1959, she travelled around Venice and its region scouting locations for La Mélangite (ou les Amours de Valentin), a film that in the end she did not make. Her photographs bear witness to her discovery of Italy and her taste for the picturesque. Her views of Venice and its inhabitants are a faithful reflection of her state of mind. In addition to her spontaneous approach to photography, she was attracted to graphic scenes that play with shadows and contrasts. At the Villa della Torre, near Verona, and the Bomarzo Gardens in the Latium, she was captivated by the materials and the strangeness of the sculptures.
In May 1963, the French magazine Réalités commissioned her to take a portrait of Luchino Visconti, who had just been awarded the Palme d'Or for his film The Leopard. She flew to Rome with three cameras. Contact sheets and colour photos bear witness to this shoot with the man the press dubbed the "taciturn prince of Italian film". At the same time, Jean-Luc Godard was making Contempt at the Titanus studios. Agnès Varda visited the set and photographed her friend directing Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Michel Piccoli.
Some fifty original prints from Rosalie Varda's collection and documents from her archives and from the collection deposited at the Hauts-de-France Institute for Photography tell the story of Varda's relationship with Italy for the first time.
Curator: Carole Sandrin, Institut pour la photographie.
In coproduction with the Institut pour la photographie des Hauts-de-France, based on the photographic collection and archives of the Succession Agnès Varda.
