All that fall

Fondazione Morra Greco presents “All that Fall”, the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy by American artist Martin Kersels (1960, USA). For the occasion, Kersels has created a new series of sculptures and installations conceived specifically for the grand salons on the first floor of Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino, transforming the spaces into a performative, ironic, and immersive environment.

The exhibition unfolds as a lively carousel of characters, objects, and moving machines parading before the viewer: works that crash onto the scene or remain suspended in an uneasy state of anticipation, occupying every dimension of space – vertical, horizontal, sonic, and visual – within a vibrant, crowded, and noisy garden of earthly delights.

A dialogue with Beckett: falls, waiting, and the ironies of fate

The exhibition title echoes the homonymous radio play written by Samuel Beckett for the BBC in 1956 and inspired by Psalm 145:14–15: “The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.” In Beckett’s text, providence gives way to sarcasm and fatalism: a daily life permeated by fragility, mishaps, minor derailments, and falls. This very atmosphere introduces visitors to Kersels’ sculptures – machines tinged with humour, activated by the artist or performers, driven by motors, counterweights, rotations, and mechanical chiasms that continuously challenge the boundary between balance and collapse. Some works rest on wheels, others hang in suspension, still others perform circular movements in a loop, composing a DIY universe of objects, sounds, materials, and iconographies that evoke an imaginary orbiting between the grotesque, the comic, and the uncanny.

A poetics of falling

The exhibition addresses falling as an existential, political, and productive condition. Gravity – considered the most enigmatic of physical forces – becomes a metaphor for our instabilities: like a contemporary Icarus, the human figure oscillates between attempts at ascent and inevitable plunges.

Amid an atmosphere that blends rural gothic with the feel of an artisan workshop, Kersels constructs a theatre of the world inhabited by figures and machines that seem to emerge from borderline visions, suspended between catastrophe and comedy. Each work enters the scene like a clumsy deus ex machina, lowered by a faulty hoist that exposes the fragility of the mechanisms holding together reality, desires, economies, and bodies.

In a present where everything deemed unproductive is cast as a failure, “All that Fall” becomes an invitation to suspend judgment: to look at what lies outside the machinery of profit – what falls, what resists, what does not function – and precisely for this reason reveals something true. Through sound, vibration, precariousness, and humour, Martin Kersels’ exhibition invites viewers to reactivate their senses, including the most elusive and necessary one: irony, the capacity to see things in reverse, to question what unfolds around us without seeking immediate answers.

Artist bio

Martin Kersels was born in Los Angeles, California. After he graduated with an undergraduate degree in art from UCLA in 1984, he became a founding member of the collaborative performance group SHRIMPS. This group worked together on movement-based performances until 1993. Back at UCLA for his MFA from 1992 to 1995, he studied with faculty members Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Nancy Rubens, and Richard Jackson. There he began to create sculptures – both intimate and large, still, and full of movement. He also made photographs that documented performative moments and videos that presented his body as both subject and object.

His interest in machines, entropy, sound, and dissolution has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group, and the thin line between humor and misfortune. Since 1995, Kersels’ objects and projects have been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including the 1997 and 2010 Whitney Biennials, the Pompidou Center, MOCA Los Angeles, the Pompidou Bruxelles, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tinguely Museum, Kunsthalle Bern, MAMCO in Geneva, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This current exhibition was created specifically for the Fondazione Morra-Greco.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. From 1995 to 2012 Kersels was a faculty member and co director of the art program at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2012 he joined the Yale School of Art Faculty in the Sculpture program where he continues to teach. He lives and works in the New Haven area of Connecticut.

“All That Fall” as part of Progetto XXI – 2025 Edition

In 2025, Fondazione Morra Greco presents a new edition of Progetto XXI, an annual programme that interweaves exhibitions, residencies, educational activities, and shared research practices developed collaboratively by the curatorial and educational departments. The 2025 edition centres on a reflection on the role of the artist in contemporary society and on the unfulfilled utopias of modernity, exploring themes such as failure, time as a contemplative dimension, and unproductive practices often marginalised by profit-oriented production systems.
Progetto XXI is promoted by Fondazione Morra Greco with the support of MADRE and Fondazione Donnaregina.

Funded by resources from FSC 2021–2027. DGR 616/2024 – Strategic Plan for Culture and Tourism 2025. Cultural actions of Fondazione Donnaregina – Museo Madre intervention. Progetto XXI, 2025 edition.