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The New Yorker

Goings about town: art

May 27, 2013

The Italian photographer fills the main gallery with a hundred very small cityscapes, hung in groups of five or ten, all featuring the same concrete-gray horizon line. Models of apartment buildings that Ventura made for his pictures arc huddled together on the floor, where they look grimy and undistinguished. But the models turn ghostly and fanciful in his pictures, which have been painted over and washed Olli until they almost resemble drawings. The buildings in these unpopulated images suggest remnants of a bombed-out city, isolated under blank or stormy skies- a neorealist stage set ready for Anna Magnani to make her Entrance. Through June 22.