During his year in the French capital, Ninghetto flourished under Issermann’s tutelage and gained the skill and confidence to develop his own style and technique and set up as an independent.

The M.A.D.Gallery Hong Kong is extremely pleased to present ‘The Solitude of a Machine’, an exhibition of five large-format prints by renowned Swiss photographer Marc Ninghetto.

For Geneva native Marc Ninghetto, creating a surreal series of photos based on his childhood heroes was something that he had wanted to do for a long time. However, as a deviation from his usual style of haute horlogerie and art photography, he had never found the platform to carry it out. Until he was asked to create something for the MB&F M.A.D.Gallery.

“When Maximilian Büsser proposed that I put on an exhibition at the M.A.D.Gallery, I thought that it would be a great chance to create something totally different to what I usually do, something more playful, and a break from my traditional style and subjects.”

“And so, with a large dollop of nostalgia, I revisited my heroes from yesteryear, and set about producing ‘The Solitude of a Machine’ collection of photos”

The Machine at the heart of this new exhibition called ‘The Solitude of a Machine’ is none other than the Japanese manga robot Grendizer, known as ‘Goldorak’ in French.’

“The M.A.D.Gallery is the perfect environment for him” says the photographer. “Not least because MB&F themselves are fans of Grendizer. After all, the MB&F rotor and buckle designs take their cues from the shape of this robot’s battle-axe, known as the asterohache in French.”

While Grendizer hails from the fictional planet Fleed, Ninghetto has succeeded in taking him from the environs of the graphic novel and TV animation, transplanting him into the real world – our world.

The result is a superb collection of fine art prints that subtly manages to imbue this cult robot with a sense of otherness and estrangement on finding himself in a real-life terrestrial environment.

In order to create the artworks, Ninghetto put to excellent use a technique he calls ‘digital sampling’, which he has gradually developed over his career. In the case of ‘The Solitude of a Machine’, this involved taking shots of a three-dimensional robot model. He then subtly incorporated it with photographs from his personal databank, a repository of photos that the artist has taken and amassed over the years to form a rich palette of images that he can subsequently use to ‘paint’ with.