Roma, Palazzo Massimo alle terme III

Marcello Grassi was born in Reggio Emilia in the 1960.

Since he was a child he has beeen attracted to photography. In 1985, after visiting some exhibitions planned for the Year of the Etruscans, he designs and realizes a work of “visual excavation” in the places, cities and necropolis of the Etruscan civilization; in 1999 on the occasion of the exhibition of his photographs at the Musée Reattu in Arles, Federico Motta Editore publishes the volume ‘Etruria’ with texts by Charles-Henri Favrod and Michèle Moutashar.

In 1992 he was commissioned to photograph the findings preserved in the Courtyard and in the Marble Gallery of the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia. From this first series of commissioned images, a long research on the Anatomy of Time (“Anatomia del Tempo”), conducted in museums and archaeological spaces in Italy and Europe, begins.

Between 1994 and 1997 he photographs the city of Arles. In 1997, commisioned by the Musée Archéologique de Nice-Cimie, he realizes a service about the local site. In 1998 the Province of Reggio Emilia invites him to photograph the Cistercian monastery of maulbronn.

In 2002 he has started working with Fabrizio Orsi to a project about Luzzara at exactly fifty years from the publication of the book ‘Un Paese’ by Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini. At the end of 2004 was presented the book ‘Luzzara Cinquant’anni e più… ’ published by Skira Editore with a text by Luciano Ligabue.

He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad where his photographs are kept in Museums and Institutions About his artistic researches they wrote among the others: Charles-Henri Favrod, Michèle Moutashar, Massimo Mussini, Nadia Raimondi, Luciano Ligabue, Robert Pujade, Umberto Nobili, Jean Arrouye, Paolo Barbaro, Elio Grazioli e Walter Guadagnini, Ilaria Bignotti.