Piero Golia

Highly conceptual and provocative, with a particular penchant for mischief and irony, Piero Golia’s work always ends up making a strong statement. It’s fitting that in a city famous for the monument par excellence, visitors to “Piero Golia: Intermission Paintings” first encounter a small, irreverent, upside-down bronze cavalier (Upside down equestrian figure as public sculpture, 2013). The subversion of the equestrian sculpture alludes to, but doesn’t fully yet reveal, the conceit of this show.

On the walls of the gallery’s main space, a series of colored marble slabs stand out in archeological-seeming magnificence. Dazzling shapes, formed from ancient Rome’s most precious and sturdy building material, strike viewers with their iridescent shades. Only at close glance does the weight of these relics become apparent: The marble is in fact made up of perishable chunks of sparkly foam, offcuts of a giant replica of George Washington’s nose from Mount Rushmore that Golia created for Comedy of Craft, 2014–15, his earlier sculptural-performance trilogy.

In the deceitful essence of this exhibition, the monumental, in Golia’s hands, becomes ephemeral, and spectators find themselves face to face with an act of illusion. The key to the show lies in another work also titled Comedy of Craft, 2015, an architectural model of Gagosian Gallery’s oval room that contains an exact replica of the exhibition. The tiny marble relics here, however, are made of real stone. The permanent manifestation of the show—the physical memory—stands within what seems to be a temporary maquette. Discussing ideas of endurance and ephemerality, time and immanence, “Intermission Paintings” renders history illusory. Even the eternal city can mislead.