Giuseppe Gabellone

GALLERIA D'ARTE MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA DI BERGAMO
Via San Tomaso 53
March 8–May 5

Giuseppe Gabellone, Proteggi Giuseppe, 2012, epoxy resin, 88 1/5 x 65 x 15 3/4”.

An enormous purple cotton carpet greets visitors as they enter the first of two rooms of Giuseppe Gabellone’s current exhibition. The expansive floor covering, Grande Viola, 2012, stretches throughout the space and commands respect, making it difficult for one to overcome an onset of embarrassment when left with no choice but to tread upon it. Alternatively, the ratio of walking room to covered floor could persuade one to go barefoot, allowing for other senses like touch to grasp the nonvisual properties of the velvety exterior and its acrylic stuffing. Also in this room, three epoxy resin pieces are installed on the surrounding walls and act as steady anchors to the consuming presence of the amorphous work below them. Featuring swirling letters, Irò, irò, irò, Mister Mother, and Proteggi Giuseppe, all 2012, seem to signify their onomatopoeic potential rather than any applicable literal meaning.

To the right of the first room, two arched passageways lead to another space where a second carpet has been placed. Verde Acido, 2012, though similar in texture and size, is here slung over a wall as if thrown over a shoulder, with most of its neon green material spilling onto the ground. Additionally, two untitled sculptures from 2013 have been installed on the wall that separates the gallery’s rooms. The first work is a bronze slab that appears as dry as the crust of a darkened loaf of bread; the second, made of aluminum, undulates in ripples that liken the shimmery texture to sea waves. Both appear to be the result of Gabellone’s analysis of the unexpressed potential of each variant material, the matte bronze as organic and the iridescent aluminum as optical. It seems that this exhibition addresses media and their inherent qualities, and more specifically their ability to translate space as well as the experience of the inhabiting viewer.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Irma Blank

P420 ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Piazza dei Martiri 5/2
January 26–March 30

Irma Blank, Schriftzug=Atemzug vom 4-8-1988 (Writing=Breathing from 4-8-1988), acrylic on canvas, 78 x 51”. From the series “Radical Writing,” 1985–95.

The German-born, Milan-based artist Irma Blank is well known for her paintings and drawings that incorporate indecipherable texts and rhythmic handwriting—pieces that offer a language more visual than textual. Her current exhibition cherry-picks works from several of her major series from the past five decades. Five pieces made in 1970 are presented from her “Eigenschriften” (Primordial Writing) series, 1968–72, in which she began her ongoing conceptual project of linguistic experimentation. In her subsequent series of “Trascrizioni” (Transcriptions), 1973–79, each mark on the page annuls a word—whether culled from novels, poetry, or newspapers—turning the original printed words into her own illegible language, as seen here in Hommage à F. Schiller, 1975. The equilibrium that is established between a formal order internal to the series and Blank’s subjectivity—between conceptual rigor and desire—enables her works to speak with a profound depth.

Another standout work here, Schriftzug=Atemzug vom 4-8-1988 (Writing=Breathing from 4-8-1988), belongs to Blank’s “Radical Writing” body of work, 1985–95. In this series, each brushstroke is applied from the center of the canvas and moves outward with an extension that corresponds to Blank’s exhale. One leaves this exhibition thinking about experience, time, and silence, all notions that this show, aptly titled “Senza parole” (Without Words), carefully traces.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Andrea Kvas

MUSEO MARINO MARINI
Piazza di San Pancrazio
February 9–April 6

Andrew Kvas, Untitled, 2012-13, mixed media, 59 x 1 1/5 x 1 1/5”.

For his first solo museum exhibition in Italy, Andrea Kvas has installed his untitled Minimalist artworks (all works 2012–13) in the underground chapel of the Museo Marino Marini, named after the twentieth-century Pistoian artist whose colorful sculptures often resemble three-dimensional paintings. Kvas’s latest work locates painting not on the frontal surface of a canvas but rather inside of rooms, the space reserved for objects.

One included work consists of twenty wooden planks, each measuring over six feet in length, neatly stacked on top of one another and wedged weblike in between the walls of a narrow crevice. Each plank is painted in a unique color scheme with polychrome brushstrokes that act as an optical mortar, the paint employing the same effect of antigravity as the tension rods as they jimmy up the nave’s architecture. Due to their slatted proximity, together the planks create a visual incongruence akin to a randomly reconstituted pile of shredded color printouts.

For this occasion, Kvas also incorporated polyurethane foam of pure color into shapes reminiscent of giant, dusty pastel chalks. Each are chipped as if tumbled together out of their box, regathered in one of the rooms over a mantel as beavers would timber for a dam. Other groupings are shuffled to a corner or laid on the floor (where Kvas usually paints), waiting to be picketed into a fence. In the interplay between intention and execution, the exhibition isn’t fixed; the artist even rearranges some of these works during the exhibition’s run. Here, sculpture isn’t a painting, nor is painting a sculpture. It is the paint itself, which barely hangs onto its support, that creates a different kind of engagement.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

“Revolution from Within”

KAUFMANN REPETTO
Via di Porta Tenaglia, 7
February 7–March 28

Birgit Juergenssen, Untitled (Improvisation), 1976, gelatin silver print, 5 x 6 3/4".

In her book Revolution from Within (1992), feminist writer Gloria Steinem takes an approach that is considerably different from that of her beginnings. She speaks of self-esteem, meditation, and of channeling one’s “inner child”; what’s more, she seems just as concerned with men’s well-being as with women’s. The choice of the book’s title as a reference for this exhibition of twelve female artists (who vary greatly in age and geographical provenance) expresses a particular position with regard to feminist art: perhaps not “post-feminist” but one that certainly belongs to a flexible understanding of the word, which, as the press release notes, evolves, is complex, and allows for a coexistence of “categories that, on the surface, appear irreconcilable: feminism and femininity, the political sphere and an aesthetic one, the domestic and collective space.”

“Revolution from Within” develops these premises in a coherent fashion: Classic themes of feminist art are not absent, but they are revisited in sometimes surprising ways, as, for example, with that trope of tropes, the representation of the female body. If Birgit Jürgenssen’s work from the 1970s, on view here, deals with it relatively canonically, through photographic self-portraits that are Surrealist in inspiration— Untitled (Improvisation), 1976, for example, has a stiletto heel sprouting out of young woman’s arm—the younger artists either seem uninterested in the subject of the body and its representation or address it obliquely. In Nothing Is Enough, 2012, Frances Stark stages her own sexual life with a video detailing an erotic conversation she had in an online chat room with a stranger—there are no images, just lines of text projected against a neutral background. In a similar vein, glossy images by Anne Collier evoke female identity through metonym and clues: Take the photograph Valerie, 2011, which features a pile of editions of the 1967 polemic SCUM Manifesto by the militant feminist Valerie Solanas—a text that called for the “elimination of men” and whose author was famously called the “Robespierre of feminism”—shot against an icy white background. The only two explicit nudes on view are both male (Goshka Macuga’s retro collages of bodybuilders).

In addition to the aforementioned artists, the exhibition, notable for its breadth, includes work by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Lutz Bacher, Andrea Bowers, Nina Canell, Marieta Chirulescu, Lucy Dodd, Yayoi Kusama, and Maria Loboda. In this tightly curated lineup, most of these artists forgo the explicit in favor of the freedom that comes with the implicit, approaching feminism with enough nuance and tenacity that it takes on new resonance.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Elisabetta Di Maggio

LAURA BULIAN GALLERY
via Montevideo 11
February 6–April 6

Elisabetta Di Maggio, Victoria #2, 2012, water lily leaves, 46 x 54 x 2 3/4”.

Elisabetta Di Maggio’s site-specific Wallpaper (all works 2012) is made of hand-cut tissue paper, her medium of choice since 1991, which here climbs upward around a supporting column between the gallery’s two rooms like pale moss on a tree bark. A standout work in “I Change but I Cannot Die,” it was originally conceived last November for the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. The piece shuns architectural integrity for something more overgrown, recalling the vertiginous origin of the artwork’s material and how it adeptly fits to shifts in the environment.

For Victoria, Di Maggio cut into three brown lily pads from the Amazon, each with an intricate network of engorged, though now dry, veins. Installed separately, they resemble organic suction cups that cling to the white walls of the gallery. Over the floor, Di Maggio abstractly hints at the leftover flight path of a nectar-hungry butterfly in Butterfly Flight Trajectory #05, a delicate, unraveled ribbon of strung-together metal pins that swirl and dive in buzzing nonlinearity. The show’s title comes from a line in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Cloud” (1880), and it encourages us to see these works accordingly, favoring the quiet metamorphosis of strung-up particles and the kinds of thoughts that accumulate through unintended pathways.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Luisa Lambri

STUDIO GUENZANI
Via Eustachi 10
February 16–April 30

Luisa Lambri, Untitled (100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminium, 1982–86, #03), 2012, laser chrome print, 31 1/4 x 37”.

In her untitled 2012 photographic series, Luisa Lambri has somewhat changed her subject. From the interiors of modernist architecture for which she is best known, she now has moved on to photographing works that are located between architecture and sculpture. The exhibition at Studio Guenzani is based on images (just seven in all) of Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Environment, 1968; Donald Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum, 1982–86; and Dan Flavin’s Untitled (Marfa Project), 1996. (The latter two works are both at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.)

Despite this shift in subject, the photographer’s conceptual and formal approach has remained unchanged. Only a close-up detail is left of the photographed works. The resulting images obey an extremely simplified and rigorous formal scheme: a rectangular field is divided in half by a straight line. In the images of works by Fontana and Judd, the line (respectively created by one of Fontana’s famous “cuts” and by a corner of one of Judd’s aluminum solids) is vertical; in the only photograph inspired by Flavin, the line is oblique.

The principal difference within this body of work though relates to light. The photographer has always liked to capture variations in natural light, and natural light predominates in the photos inspired by Judd: It is the light of Marfa’s desert landscape, reflected in the metal and changing from one shot to another. In the images of the works by Fontana and Flavin, Lambri employs static, artificial lighting, making the Fontana photos—white fields divided vertically by black lines—almost indistinguishable from one another. It is thus their arrangement in the gallery space that becomes important, the way in which, together with the other images, they create an austere, slow, and regular visual rhythm. The layout of the photographs in their exhibition space has always been an important factor for Lambri. In her latest work, it achieves the same importance as the photographs themselves.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Carlo Benvenuto

GALLERIA SUZY SHAMMAH
via San Fermo / via Moscova 25
March 21–May 11

Carlo Benvenuto, untitled, 2013, c-print on aluminum, 75 x 63”.

A C-print photograph in Carlo Benvenuto’s latest exhibition (all works untitled, 2013) depicts a table covered by a white tablecloth. In the middle, a silver fruit dish filled with pears, an apple, and a banana seems to hover above the rest of the scene’s relative flatness. To create this effect, Benvenuto first took a picture of the fruit and then took another exposure of the table. Before printing these images, he superimposed them on the same negative, achieving an optical halo around the fruit bowl reminiscent of a collage. The objects, resulting image, and even Benvenuto’s process seem metaphysical: Rather than just responding to the parameters of material construction, in this exhibition the artist challenges the basic limits of visual comprehension and how often they can spill over in the particularities of recollection.

Usually, Benvenuto portrays his subjects in settings illuminated solely by natural light. But for a few works in this exhibition, he also employed a red filter; the same table with the tablecloth and fruit changes into another image entirely, a still life inundated with vibrant crimson. Because of the similar tonalities between white and silver, the fruit is disengaged from the setting, now visually floating above the picture plane instead of on the table set in reality. In a triptych with backgrounds of floral drapery, he achieves the opposite effect. He places a teacup, an egg on a platter, and a metal chalice all under the same red ambiance, camouflaging and embedding the objects into the patterned background. The same chalice is also photographed alone, upright and overturned, in another work. The entire show refers to the artist’s childhood home in the town of Stresa, Italy, which overlooks picturesque Lake Maggiore. In ways similar to how memory can present twists on factual narrative, Benvenuto’s pictures seem to alter the domestic realities of his youth.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Giulia Piscitelli

GALLERIA FONTI
Via Chiaia 229
February 15–May 18

Giulia Piscitelli, ART. 12, 2013, ministerial Italian flag, 86 1/2 x 41 3/4".

Giulia Piscitelli’s research entrusts its poetic power to nuances, to the revival of fragility and the ephemeral, to the revaluation of small things and gestures. She investigates tensions in the aesthetic redemption of the quotidian; her process often favors minimal intervention, a focus on microevents or micronarrations that lead, as if by magic, to epiphanic experiences of those nearby. Magic as art has the power to modify reality, an equation that Piscitelli reintroduces with “Sim Sala Bim,” the title she borrowed from an exclamation that will be familiar to those, like this writer, who were children in Italy in the late 1970s and watched on TV the exploits of Silvan the magician. Like Silvan, the artist creates a jagged landscape of disorienting images and impressions—disrupted fragments of reality.

Viewers are welcomed by an unsettling sound of wind, emitted by BRICST, 2013, a video whose acronymic title (referring to Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Turkey) gestures toward economic growth rather than crisis. A stationary shot of a torn red flag—the sort used on beaches to indicate danger—stands out against a stormy background. This image is echoed in the piece ART. 12, 2013—an Italian flag from which the red strip hangs down, having come unstitched—its title referring to the article in the Italian constitution that precisely defines the formal characteristics of the nation’s flag. Enchantment finally materializes in full as a sculpture, for which the artist revived an ancient traditional technique, working on a hand-woven woolen blanket. But Piscitelli makes the process dysfunctional by impregnating the piece with water and sugar and transforming it into a rigid structure. This is the artist’s moment of true prestidigitation, during which she transforms everyday materials into something with unexpected form—as magically, in a sense, as the women’s work to which this piece pays homage. In this piece Piscitelli offers a sort of mysterious trunk: provisions for an exhibition that provides no answers, but poses further questions.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

Ulla von Brandenburg

MONITOR
Palazzo Sforza Cesarini, Via Sforza Cesarini 43a-44
February 9–March 16

Ulla von Brandenburg, Eigenschatten I-VI (Self-Shadow I-VI), 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Ulla von Brandenburg’s work typically creates a strong sense of disorientation, which is precisely the feeling that prevails in her monumental installation, Eigenschatten I-VI (Self Shadow I-VI), 2013, the hallmark of her debut solo exhibition in Italy. Suspended from the ceiling are objets trouvés, which the artist has culled from flea markets around Rome. This dangling collection creates a metaphysical atmosphere that amplifies the bewildering affects so signature to Brandenburg’s practice. Also part of this installation is a series of canvases that face the objects; through an innovative chlorine photographic printing process, the artist has reproduced the outlines of the objects in the form of a shadow.

Whether by its title or iconographic repertory, the installation brings to mind Richard Strauss’s opera Die frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), 1917, for which this installation might be intended as a set. Indeed, the work evokes a theater—whether on the stage, curtain closed, before or after the performance, or perhaps, its storerooms, where dismantled sets are kept. The exhibition begins as if by magic, with the appearance of the viewer, whose presence plays a key role in the artist’s research—every set requires an actor. One only need think, for example, of Death of a King, conceived for the Palais de Tokyo in 2012, which was also a vast environment that resembled a set; the public was invited to enter and move about as they wished. This project is articulated in a similar fashion, marked visually by a nearly baroque theatricality generated, perhaps, by the past six months von Brandenburg has spent in Rome.

The current exhibition also includes the video Shadowplay, 2012—originally created last year for Frieze Projects in New York—that also focuses on the concept of theater and of shadow. Here, a white screen is animated by the dark outlines of three figures shot in the act of getting dressed, putting on makeup, and singing a composition by Laurent Montaron. The fantastical and oneiric tone that prevails once again places viewers in a condition of spatial/temporal dislocation, confirming their roles as unknowing interpreters.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Pier Paolo Pancotto

Uri Aran

KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH
Limmatstrasse 270
February 2–March 24

View of “Uri Aran,” 2013.

Uri Aran’s solo exhibition “Here, Here and Here” tells a story of struggles to construct compelling, coherent, and relatable narratives. Using assemblage, video, and drawing, Aran shows bits of evidence that imply potential plots, though what he really demonstrates are failures to communicate.

The aspiring raconteurs in Chimpanzee, 2012, Aran’s twenty-five-minute video, tell fragments of anecdotes. Talking to the camera alone or in pairs, Aran’s attractive adult actors sound like kids telling tales. But their rambling, breathless stories of climbing trees, liking or disliking their neighbors, and other familiar elements of life seem strange and strained by their awkward, overexcited delivery. Their stories never reach definite conclusions, but Aran’s actors delight in telling them.

Two installations that physically present objects also seen in the video give little support to the stories. Inside cardboard boxes presented on pedestals for easy inspection are arrangements of artificial grapes, passport photos, pizza boxes, and other commonplace items. The objects and references that Aran selects for special attention are banal, but appear sentimental. These are artifacts from “you had to have been there” stories. Thick pools of resin allude to glue binding them together, but their relationship remains obscure. Even when they are seen again as constructed sculptures on a ledge in the gallery’s final room, or hung on the walls, their meaning is mysterious.

All this work points back toward Chimpanzee, and amid all the uncertainty, Aran succeeds in generating empathy for that video’s mealy-mouthed characters. He makes art out of awkwardness: By drawing attention to challenges in expressing experience, he turns self-consciousness into nascent self-awareness.

— Ana Finel Honigman