“Gallery, Galerie, Galleria”

On the floors, in room after room of this exhibition, are small piles of reddish powder—the result of perforating the gallery’s brick walls. The work, Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s Autobiography (if these walls could speak), 2009, evokes the exhibition history of this new Turin gallery. (The holes themselves were made in places where works were installed in the four previous shows.) In contrast to these actions, an object that seems precious––a minuscule white model of a building, contained in a drop of amber-colored resin––provides an object of wonder. Tomas Chaffe’s Lithuanian Gold, 2008, depicts the multistory building within which the Tulips and Roses Gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania, is located. The surprises in this show continue with a miniature of the door that recalls the famous Wrong Gallery, which was once in New York. The work is one of an edition of five hundred created by Andreas Slominski in 2004, in memory of the action that led him to use that original door as a dining table.

Adam Carr, the curator of the show, has staged an examination of the history of the art gallery, and of the ways in which artists have probed the very idea of the institution. Carr has involved thirty-six artists, both well known and emerging. Employing a curatorial method that seems in between those of a theater director and a cultivated philologist, he has constructed an exhibition that is refined but not lacking in twists. It includes not only works but also documents, ephemera, and relics of events that have shaped history. These are arranged inside display cases, juxtaposed with works created specifically for the occasion, or site- and situation-specific pieces conceived by artists for other galleries. The important examples gathered here include both those related to the pictorial wall interventions that Daniel Buren created in 1968 for the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan and those connected to Michael Asher’s impressive 1973 sandblasting of the spaces of the Galleria Franco Toselli, also in Milan.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.