On Saturday 12 April at 5 pm, Galleria Studio Cenacchi, Via Santo Stefano 63, Bologna, opens In the Garden of Eden, a photography exhibition by Luca Madera.

For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Madera takes inspiration from his reading and study of John Milton’s seventeenth-century epic poem Paradise Lost.

Milton’s account of the Fall — Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden — became the starting point for a photographic project developed over several years. Madera repeatedly returned to the countryside around Bologna, photographing its natural landscapes and gradually shaping his own visual response to Milton’s poem.

Luca Madera writes:

“In the Garden of Eden, we can all find ourselves in the belief that the other person is an end in themselves, that each of us exists as an end for the other.

Even if we live on different continents, we meet face to face in the Garden of Eden. It is neither a fairy tale nor a legend, but the deepest and most elemental nature of the world we inhabit. Yet we are unable to live within it because we do not know how to see it. We do not know where or how to look, or whom to look at. Because the Garden of Eden is a ‘who’, not a ‘where’. The other person — our sister, our brother — is the ‘where’, the true place in which our lives unfold.”

The exhibition features 12 medium- and large-format photographs, with further images from Madera’s project presented as a projection. Spread across the gallery’s three levels, the exhibition leads visitors through the visual journey conceived by the artist.

The exhibition is curated by Jacopo Cenacchi.

Luca Madera
In the Garden of Eden
12 April > 8 May 2025

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday: 4.30–7.30 pm
Monday: by appointment
Sunday: closed

SPECIAL OPENINGS
14 April and 5 May

SPECIAL CLOSURE
19 April