Alessandra Spranzi: La dimensione delle cose / The Dimension of Things

IUNO presents La dimensione delle cose / The Dimension of Things, the first monographic catalogue dedicated to the Italian artist Alessandra Spranzi (Milan, 1962). Edited by Ilaria Gianni, and published by Viaindustriae, the volume has been supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024).

Conceived as a long-form reflection on a practice unfolding over more than two decades, the book seeks to render the complexity of a body of work that moves across photography, collage, found imagery, drawing, and video, tracing its development from its initial articulations to the present.

For Spranzi, photography and video are, first and foremost, ways of seeing and of reimagining the world. Rather than privileging technique, her attention is directed toward the elementary gestures of the photographic act—looking, enlarging, reducing, reproducing, reassembling—understood as actions through which the image is continuously analyzed, displaced, and rewritten. These processes generate bodies of works in which fragments, objects, and memories are staged, and in which the familiar is subtly unsettled by slippages and suspensions of meaning.

Developed in close dialogue with the artist and with the graphic designer Filippo Nostri, the editorial project unfolds along both chronological and thematic paths. The volume articulates the evolution of Spranzi’s practice while foregrounding a set of recurring motifs that persistently traverse and structure her research, such as the tension between scale and intimacy, the circulation and transformation of images, and the oscillation between reality and marvel.

The publication features original contributions by Cecilia Canziani, Ilaria Gianni, Estelle Hoy, Quinn Latimer, and Simone Menegoi, whose essays offer historically grounded readings, critical perspectives, and poetic deviations that run alongside and in resonance with Spranzi’s work.

In parallel, the catalogue’s public presentations are conceived as moments of exchange with established institutions and actors in the European contemporary art scene, opening encounters with Spranzi’s practice, which seeks to reveal the essence of the elemental image and its extraordinary, feral power, still active today in a world saturated with images as a quiet yet persistent form of resistance.

Alessandra Spranzi (Milan, 1962) lives and works in Milan and is represented by P420, Bologna. 

Her practice is rooted in photography, photographic staging, the reuse of her own and others’ images, collage, the photographing of photographs, and video. Since 1992 she has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in public and private spaces, including: P420, Bologna; Casa Morandi, Bologna; IUNO, Rome; Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; Colección INELCOM, Madrid; Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia; Palazzo Duchi di Santo Stefano, Taormina; The Women’s Darkroom + Gallery, New York; Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Frankfurt; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Centre National de la Photographie, Île-de-France; MAMbo, Bologna; Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo; Festival di Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia; Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan. Since 1997 she has produced numerous publications and artist’s books. Her most recent volume, Tecnica senza vocabolario (a+mbookstore edizioni, 2023), was presented on the occasion of the exhibition Numero Speciale together with Bibliography4, which brings together the sixteen books published by the artist between 1997 and 2023.

Upcoming book launches
February 7, 4pm—Book Talk at Arte Fiera, Bologna / March 5, 7pm—La Central, Madrid / March 27, 6pm—LE BAL, Paris / April 16, 5pm—Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck

Cultural partners: 
LE BAL, Paris; Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; La Central, Madrid; Arte Fiera, Bologna

Alessandra Spranzi: La dimensione delle cose / The Dimension of Things
Viaindustriae publishing 
368 pages, Paperback with dust jacket, Language: EN/IT, 22x31 cm ​color+b&w, ISBN: 979-12-81790-27-8, Printed in January 2026

The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024).