print Summer 2018

Mathilde Rosier

In a site-specific intervention at the Fondazione Guido Lodovico Luzzatto in Milan this past spring, titled“Figures of Climax of the Impersonal Empire,” French artist Mathilde Rosier established a dialogue with the house in which the great Italian intellectual and art critic spent his life, inserting her surreally inflected pictorial depictions among household furnishings and archival materials. In her concurrent gallery show, “Impersonal Empire, the Buds,” she modified the actual space, adding a wall, positioned diagonally to the entry corridor, that functioned as a screen for a video projection

print April 2018

Luca Maria Patella

The multifaceted artist Luca Maria Patella was born in Rome in 1934. Over the course of his long career, he has worked in various media, from film, sculpture, photography, and performance to object-related installation, not to mention writing, where his continual wordplay injects a strong measure of irony. Curated by Alberto Fiz, this small survey of Patella’s work from the late 1960s to the late 1980s originated at the Galleria Il Ponte in Florence, where it also included pieces tied to that city’s history. These examples of the artist’s “contextual” work were not, however, displayed at Galleria

print February 2018

Eva Marisaldi

This exhibition by Eva Marisaldi, her first solo show in Italy since 2014, was held in a historic gallery in the city where she lives. It showed the artist’s poetic, at times somewhat naive approach to technology in images that, as is typical of her work, seemed hermetic and enigmatic at first glance, but soon revealed their origins in experience.

The walls of the entire irregular space were intersected at eye level by a row of A4 (approximately letter-size) photocopies of a sequence of drawings: scenes of people on boats floating on a lake, taken from a sequence in Roman Polanski’s first feature

print January 2018

Jan De Cock

“Is it still possible today for art to exist outside of the rules and demands of the market?” It seems strange to read this question as the opening line of a commercial gallery’s press release, and stranger still to discover “communism” as one of the stated objectives of an artist working within the existing art system. And yet this was the case with Jan De Cock’s “Everything for You, Torino.” Apparently De Cock is working to critique the market from within. His own word for his practice is sculpturecommunism. To this end, he uses his studio as a design and exhibition space for his own work.

print October 2017

Paola Di Bello

Paola Di Bello’s most recent show in Milan consisted of two series of photographs: one recent, “Ora e qui, Milano” (Now and Here, Milan), 2016, and one spanning the past decade and a half, “Rear Window,”2000–16, created in New York. In both cases, images of the city, of urban landscapes, are shot from inside various apartments, looking out at streets and buildings, and in the case of Milan focusing on the Piazza del Duomo and the immediately adjacent streets. In both series, the views afford perfectly objective, realistic glimpses of the metropolises. What we see, however, looks far from real.

print September 2017

Liliana Moro

It had been some time since Liliana Moro has had a solo show of recent work in her native city of Milan, although earlier this year she participated in a two-artist show with Francesco Fonassi at Renata Fabbri. In keeping with Moro’s usual practice, “Ouverture,” her exhibition at Francesco Pantaleone—a young gallery from Palermo that has recently opened a new space in the Lombard capital—consisted of a very concise selection of work, in this case two sculptures and four drawings connected by the theme of still life. The first sculpture viewers encountered, Ouverture (all works 2017),

print May 2017

Mario Nigro

The Italian art of the period spanning the late 1940s through the 1970s is currently undergoing widespread reinterpretation. Under these circumstances, this exhibition of the work of Mario Nigro, a leading practitioner of a rigorous brand of abstraction, could not have been more timely. The show, accompanied by a catalogue with a text by Luca Massimo Barbero, documented two periods of the artist’s work, quite distinct but connected by his care for the relationship between the two-dimensional work, space, and time. It opened with Ritmo verticale (Vertical Rhythm), 1948, a surface rhythmically

print April 2017

Chiara Dynys

“Look Afar,” Chiara Dynys’s most recent series of works, derives from an experience the artist lived through personally, one that has all the characteristics of an extreme ordeal. She spent forty days in Abisko National Park in Swedish Lapland, nearly 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, during the total darkness of the coldest months, December to February, staying in a shelter with nothing but the bare necessities for survival. Her purpose was to photograph the aurora borealis. Approximately eighteen thousand images produced during her stay formed the basis for this exhibition, curated by

print February 2017

Enzo Cucchi

Despite his long involvement in the painting-oriented movement Transavanguardia, Enzo Cucchi has recently focused on sculpture and drawing (for which he has always shown a predilection), using painting primarily as commentary on these two other mediums. This recent show at ZERO confirmed this preference; the most extraordinary works were three sculptures—housed within the gallery’s interior spaces and outside the entrance—and it does not seem an exaggeration to say “extraordinary,” as Cucchi’s poetic inspiration never fails to surprise.

When entering the courtyard space, viewers saw a

print November 2016

Igor Eškinja

Three large canvases, hung from the ceiling on metal slats, created a virtual space within the real space of the gallery. They were made of polyester—light, almost immaterial, translucent—and enabled viewers to see each other walking about the space: Even the slightest breath of air moved the diaphanous partitions. Onto these large fields Igor Eškinja has printed photographs mostly shot in Rijeka, the city in Croatia where he lives. Depicted are large, anonymous apartment blocks, devoid of any aesthetic value, built in the early 1970s in anticipation of the city’s industrial development,

print Summer 2012

Michael Fliri and Asta Gröting

Michael Fliri and Asta Gröting were, respectively, student and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and this past spring the younger artist decided to show his most recent work together with that of his former professor in a two-person show titled “In Between.” Fliri, who is one of the most interesting artists to have emerged in Italy in recent years, engages in performative works that serve as phases in a specific search for identity. On this occasion, he engaged in an action, The wrong turn offered unexpected discoveries, 2011/2012, that was particularly expressive. Wearing a sort

previews May 2012

Stefano Arienti

Every year, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa organizes an exhibition in collaboration with Teatro La Fenice, charging the chosen artist with both a solo show and the creation of a work for the curtain of the famed Venetian opera house.

Every year, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa organizes an exhibition in collaboration with Teatro La Fenice, charging the chosen artist with both a solo show and the creation of a work for the curtain of the famed Venetian opera house. This year, Stefano Arienti takes a turn with a presentation of all-new works at the BLM’s Palazzetto Tito, while his hall-size commission sets a majestic stage for Swiss choreographer Foofwa d’Imobilité. Arienti is known for his deft handling of simple objects—carpets, drawings, pieces of marble, books—and he will employ such

print February 2012

Nedko Solakov

On the program for Nedko Solakov, starting last fall, has been a retrospective exhibition at four European museums—first at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, now at the Fondazione Galleria Civica in Trento, Italy, and coming up at SMAK in Ghent, Belgium, and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, Portugal. The show’s concept calls for each year of the artist’s activity, from 1981 to 2010, to be documented by one work or series of works chosen by the curators of each exhibition venue. Each location thus presents different work, but there are some overlaps, since the curators

previews January 2012

Salvatore Scarpitta

Salvatore Scarpitta (1919–2007) may have been born in Brooklyn and raised in LA, but according to the patrons and fans who long supported him in Italy, he was also a card-carrying Italian. Now, after an absence of several years from Italian public institutions, Scarpitta returns with a major exhibition in Turin. More commonly known for his sculptural engagement with sleds and cars (which he also raced), he is poised—via a thoughtfully researched selection of approximately sixty pieces made between 1957 and 2000—to be understood anew as an

print October 2011

Douglas Gordon

Three different interventions made up this Scottish artist’s recent exhibition: some neon writing, a photographic installation, and a video installation. The neon piece, Unfinished, 2011, installed in the gallery entrance, carried the words JE SUIS LE NOMBRIL DU MONDE (I am the navel of the world). The neon was fractured right in the center, and fragments were visible on the floor. While it was turned on, the words were difficult to read, and thus it became a metaphor for an active subjectivity that is nevertheless conscious of its own limitations.

The other two works were perhaps exemplifications

print September 2011

Pae White

The new works that made up Pae White’s recent exhibition, “A piece of the almost grey sky . . . ,” had each been assigned an allusive and ironic title. Two large tapestries with white backgrounds, coming after those enormous ones with black backgrounds seen at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, are called Milan Hazy 1 and Milan Hazy 2 (all works cited, 2011), the English words recalling through assonance the Italian name for the inhabitants of Milan: Milanesi. The images were originally photographs of coils of smoke, to which White gave plastic relief and visual consistency while maintaining their

print September 2011

Jean-Baptiste Maitre

A young French artist based in Amsterdam, Jean-Baptiste Maitre is engaged in a project that might be described as the deconstruction of the modernist text. Not Necessarily Words, 2010, the work that gives his solo show its title, appeared, at first glance, to be a piece of writing in yellow neon, inexplicably turned off; then one realized that it was a skillfully molded ceramic bas-relief. The artist told me that his intention is to compare the manual nature of a traditional artistic process with the industrial techniques that were introduced into art by avant-garde practices in the 1970s.

Another

print Summer 2011

John McCracken

The Manica Lunga, or “long sleeve,” of the Castello di Rivoli takes its name from its shape. It is a long, relatively narrow wing of the building—a corridor studded with windows. Although the exhibition space is usually difficult to handle, it might nonetheless be almost perfect for John McCracken’s sculptures. Brightly colored and almost sparklingly vivid, positioned in the space with great freedom, they make the Manica Lunga look as if it were inhabited by creatures from another dimension, similar to the cosmic realm of the aliens to which the artist alludes in his work and which he

print Summer 2011

Gabriele Di Matteo

In the inventory of the Prado in Madrid, Velázquez’s Las Meninas used to be called, rather, a “family portrait,” and this is how Gabriele Di Matteo titled his exhibition: “Quadro di Famiglia.” Five large replicas of the celebrated painting were exhibited on the walls, each the same size as the original but fragmented into sixteen square modules that, together, make up the famous scene—the presentation of the Infanta Margarita during a sitting for a portrait. More precisely, four paintings repeated this scene, while the fifth showed the modules in scattered order, a sort of re-creation in

print April 2011

Eva Marisaldi

Eva Marisaldi’s recent exhibition was dominated by two new works, both 2010: a large sculpture, Post It, and Underlines, a video made in collaboration with Enrico Serotti, who also wrote the music, which lent the show its title. Both were inspired by a short film on YouTube in which some entomologists in Brazil discover a gigantic ant colony. By injecting into the anthill a liquid that then solidifies, the scientists obtain a cast of this large excavation carried out by the insects, a complex system of spaces forming channels and spherical cells. The idea of this type of construction project,

Giorgio Verzotti