Roger Ballen. Spirits and Spaces

opening: Thursday, May 29th, 2025 from 5.00PM to 8.30PM

BUILDING TERZO PIANO is pleased to present, from May 29th to July 12th, 2025, Roger Ballen. Spirits and Spaces: Ballen’s first solo exhibition at BUILDING, which inaugurates the exclusive collaboration between the artist and the gallery that now represents him in Italy.

After working exclusively in black and white for more than 50 years, the new exhibition offers a preview of Roger Ballen’s first selection of color photographs. These works were made over the past six years, and will be featured within his new monograph, Spirits and Spaces, to be published by Thames & Hudson in fall 2025. The photographs were developed in collaboration with Marguerite Rossouw, art director of Ballen’s studio.

In addition to color images, the exhibition also features a selection of Polaroids produced between 2024 and 2025. These were transformed using archival color inks. Through this mixture of mediums, Ballen creates images that further challenge the boundary between reality and fiction.

Roger Ballen’s visual aesthetic is fundamentally psychological and existential. His photographs, set in claustrophobic spaces inhabited by dark creatures and figures, are unique, enigmatic, and fascinating. As Colin Rhodes writes in The Theatre of Colors (Spirits and Spaces): “The worlds created in these photographs are related to the theatre, a relationship fully acknowledged by Ballen himself. Their staging – always close-up – supports compelling and profound micro-dramas that speak to fundamental aspects of the human condition. They are not related to grand theatres, in which audience and drama are empathetically separated, but to small, intimate spaces of repertory (…), where audiences are pressed up close, and often actively engaged with the performance and unfolding narrative”.

Roger Ballen. Spirits and Spaces will take place in at the same time with major exhibitions and solo projects dedicated to the artist in Rome:

● Mario Giacomelli. The Photographer and the Artist, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli, from May 20th to August 3rd, 2025, will take place at the Palazzo Esposizioni. The exhibition will offer a series of dialogues between the work of five great masters of contemporary art and photography.
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● Animalism, curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, from May 27th to July 27th, 2025, will be on view at the Mattatoio. The exhibition explores the profound and often disturbing relationship between humans and animals. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Quodlibet and designed by Filippo Nostri, with a conversation between Roger Ballen and curator Alessandro Dandini de Sylva.
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● At the Festival de Cabanes at Villa Medici, from June 5th to September 30th, 2025, the artist will transform a hut into the studio of a Brut artist.
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