In this exhibition, Turin-born, New York–based artist Luisa Rabbia has included a large sculptural drawing titled Together (all works 2007), which depicts trees in porcelain. Having been spread out in its liquid, siliconelike state, the material bears the natural fissures that formed as it hardened. The cracks, then, are almost like rings of actual trees, in that they measure the passage of time. On the ground is the sculpture Sulla curva del giorno (On the Arc of the Day), in which the umbilical cord of a blue newborn baby spreads out like intertwined roots, similar to those of the trees on the wall. Al di là dell’alba (Behind Sunrise) is a video that asks the viewer to observe a slowly running river, but there is one disturbing element: The water is red, like blood. In Rabbia’s work, graphic details like this—and like the network of veins on the baby—are important, for they accentuate the physicality of the objects. But the artist also investigates materials themselves, and in that way her sculpture refers to the work of predecessors like Adolfo Wildt and Arturo Martini. Here, as in her earlier work, Rabbia explores individual, collective, and natural growth and the forces, both evident and latent, that allow us to go on every day.
