Angelo Musco

Born

Naples, Italy, 1973

Based

New York City, since 1997

Medium

Monumental photographic composites of the human body

Angelo Musco makes photographs at a scale, and by a method, that almost nothing else in the Wild Project roster resembles. Born in Naples in 1973 and based in New York since 1997, he photographs nude volunteers — in the studio and, for the aquatic works, underwater — then digitally weaves the figures by the thousand into vast composite images he calls bodyscapes: eggs, nests, tissues, seas, and forests built entirely from human bodies. The numbers are part of the work's meaning. Tehom, named for the primordial deep of Genesis, is composed from an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 bodies, most of them photographed submerged; Xylem, named for the vascular tissue that carries water through a tree, absorbed more than a million. Seen from across a room the images read as nature; at close range they dissolve into individual limbs, spines, and faces, each one placed by hand so the whole holds together as a single photograph.

Musco has linked the imagery of gestation, water, and swarming bodies to his own difficult birth, an origin story the press around the work has repeated since the bodyscapes began drawing coverage in the early 2010s.

Wild Project Gallery gave him its final documented exhibition: The Body Behind the Body – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (1 Jun – 22 Jul 2017). When the show closed, the gallery's exhibition record — fourteen entries across not quite two years — stopped.

Record at Wild Project Gallery

WPG.14 The Body Behind the Body – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (1 Jun – 22 Jul 2017). Solo exhibition; the last documented show in the program. See the exhibition chronology and the institutional record.