LONDON.- As the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing approaches on 20 July, Damiani announces Moon Atlas, an artistic exploration more than twenty years in the making by Italian photographer and designer Luca Missoni who has been captivated by the Moon since childhood.

Missoni’s artistic voyage started with an exploration of the changeable face of the Moon and its enduring appeal. His meticulous research consists in the observation and mapping of its image, exploring the surface and the small changes on it. His images are organized in four different themes - Portraits of the Moon’s Phases, Colorful Images, Surrealistic Compositions and Installation Views.

As art critic and curator Maurizio Bortolotti explains in his Preface:

“The concentrated focus expressed by his photographs preserves and elaborates on the same sense of surprise of his early discoveries while still very young. The purity of his Moon portraits conveys the innocence sensed by a child’s discovery of the world. At the same time, he has been able to give us a more contemporary representation of his subject, after the technological studies resulting from the Moon trips of the Sixties.

Through his obsession for the depiction of details of the Moon’s surface, Luca Missoni introduces another side to the exploration of its image. The artist’s focus comes very close to an objective representation. In this way he can combine purity and objectivity as the main features of his work and the result is a new fresh image of the Moon based on these two aspects.”

Missoni’s method of photographing the Moon is based on the use of a telescope. He has set up installations in a cave or old church intending to recreate the same condition of viewing the Moon through the telescope. A method Bortollotti calls Missoni’s Cannocchiale.

This impressive new Moon Atlas also includes a conversation between Missoni and Bortolotti, an essay by the astrophysicist Cesare Guaita about the Moon in science and myth, and Galileo’s Treatise of 1610 - The Sidereal Messenger - which inspired Missoni to create his atlas of the Moon.

An exciting voyage of discovery to a celestial body that has always continued to fascinate humanity, Moon Atlas includes more than forty shots in a detailed sequence of phases; and includes the unpublished chromatic experiments Missoni has made with his photographs.

For the family business Luca Missoni has directed Knitwear Research and Product Development, and for more than twenty years designed for the Men's and Sport Collections. Today he is the Artistic Director of the Missoni Archive. Photography has always been an integral part of his visual research. Missoni's photographic works have been presented at the Photology Gallery, Milan in 2001 and his first solo show was in 2002 at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. Since 2008 Luca Missoni as been represented by the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. Another great passion of his is flying and airplanes. Together with his wife Judith and their family, they live between Varese, Italy and New York.