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4. Sam Durant (1961, Seattle, United States)
U.S. History (Blues for Abraham Lincoln), 2002, is an installation accompanied by a ballad dedicated to Abraham Lincoln. The image of the upturned tree refers to Robert Smithson’s 1969 series of photographs taken between Yucatán, New York and Florida, Upside Down Trees, which the artist in his essay Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatán (1969), describes as “monuments to uprootedness,” in reference to revolutionary figures such as that of Jesus Christ.
Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president and statesman celebrated as a patriot of the nation, was a staunch anti-slavery man. In 1864, Lincoln passed the amendment to the Constitution that finally sanctioned the abolition of slavery in the Southern states. Nevertheless, he was also the signer of the largest mass execution in the United States that took place in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862, where thirty-eight Dakota Indians lost their lives.
Sam Durant’s work investigates political issues related to American history by mixing references to minimal and post-minimal art, rock and roll history, and activism, shedding light on the often shadowy side of history and the power structures inscribed in its narrative and transmission.
In an exercise in revisionism, the work also interrogates another aspect of American history, investigating the conflict between the country’s North and South — a pattern of social conflict to this day universal to almost every geography on the planet. Located on the second floor of the Foundation, U.S. History (Blues for Abraham Lincoln), reflects on the ambivalence of grand narratives by denouncing a motif that seems to characterize the balance of the world even in the late modern era, such as the conflict between dominant and lesser powers.
4. Sam Durant, U.S. History (Blues for Abraham Lincoln), 2002, Tree, mirror, sound system, tree: 135 cm, mirror: 112 x 112 cm
5. Jonathan Monk (1969, Leicester, UK)
A Work in Progress (to be completed when the time comes) 1969 -, 2005 is a black granite funerary sculpture that the collector is called upon to finish when the time comes, mocking the procedures, system and workings of the artwork in a play of parts between artist and work owner.
Often appropriating and deviating slightly from the works and ideas of conceptual, minimalist, and post-minimalist artists, Jonathan Monk’s work destabilizes the principle of uniqueness, working through meta-artistic operations, questioning authorship, and desacralizing the myth of the artist-genius.
Monk’s practice ranges across different media and formats, from neon and painting to books, sculpture and photography, video and installation. Elements of the “stories” that construct his works are drawn from and mixed with autobiographical events, historical references or overlooked aspects of everyday life. Members of Monk’s family, artist-myths from previous generations or perfect strangers, as well as everyday objects and images, enter the work without hierarchical distinctions or boundaries between high culture and ordinary existence.
By questioning the status of originality, of the author and thus of the artwork itself, of the art system and its rules or conventions, Jonathan Monk’s works often reflect potentially infinite ways of interpreting history, art history or facts, revealing the innumerable potentialities of reality.
5. Jonathan Monk, A Work in Progress (to be completed when the time comes) 1969 – , 2005, Black granite, carved, 60 x 40 x 3 cm, Unique
6. Renato Leotta (1982, Turin, Italy)
Negativo dal cielo, 2021, is a sculptural work composed of volcanic ash produced during 2021 by the explosions of Etna volcano, during one of the tightest periods of magmatic and paroxysmal activity in recent times.
The ash is composed of mineral and rock particles ejected along with the magma, which crystallize into tiny particles during the explosive phase of the eruption. These black clouds are carried for miles by the wind, settling on cars and in the streets, erasing features of the extremely fertile and lush landscape growing at the foot of Mount Etna.
The artist, in co-production with nature, exposed a number of plinths to the action of wind and ash, allowing the newly created matter from within the earth and erupted from the volcano to fall naturally onto their surface before touching the ground and adhering to the landscape. From the depths of the earth to the plinth of the museum, Negativo dal cielo captures the image of nature’s creative power by museifying the ash on the plinth. Like the inverted image of the sky, the museum, which opens its windows, lets nature in.
Renato Leotta’s production is based on observing and recording the operation of natural processes. The contact sampling of casts of Mediterranean sandy shorelines from the Gipsoteca series, the recording of the fluctuation of the tides through the impression of sea salt on the water-immersed canvas of Multiverso, e Poseidonia, 2022, the concertino for the sea obtained from the conversion of the genetic code of some Poseidonia plant samples from the Mediterranean Sea are some of the works that reflect the artist’s interest in the politicized aspect of the relationship between human beings and nature.
6. Renato Leotta, Negativo del cielo, 2021, Ash eruption from the Etna Volcano on February 17, 2021 brought by the wind until the surfaces, marine plywood bases, 5 elements variable dimension
7. Petra Feriancová (1977, Bratislava, Slovakia)
The installation Judge, 2014 refers to the Areopagus tribunal in Athens and the trial of Socrates, who famously never addressed the judges in a direct form (except after his final conviction), but using even on that occasion the form of dialogue that had characterized his philosophy based on doubt and irony, which cost him his life.
The work, exhibited at the Foundation in 2014, reflects the process of storing and reprocessing visual and mnemonic, perceptual and unconscious suggestions, filtered by time and the individual’s subjectivity, forming knowledge in a constant hand-to-hand with one’s personal history. The presence of pedestals, as recurring elements in museum practice, question the museum as a “container” in the formation of knowledge that, by manipulating and canonizing the meaning of objects, changes and distorts their original meaning.
Petra Feriancová’s work is based on the use and vivification of the archive. Her practice investigates the mechanics and association of images and objects, real stories and archetypal intuitions that, mingling with the artist’s autobiographical story, form a score of connections that link the present to the past in a kind of unbroken continuum, presenting a universal memory in the symbolic bearing of accidents and objects, or in the atavistic memory inscribed in materials such as wood, clay, or metal.
Nothing seems to be destroyed or created, in a circularity of energy and matter that is preserved and regenerated, like the skin of a snake.
Placed in dialogue with Giulia Piscitelli’s work, these works reflect two different forms of elaboration and reflection around object and image culture, investigating in some ways its accumulation, archiving, reuse, and mending, within a system and contemporaneity that influence and act, consciously or unconsciously, in the private sphere of the individual, with entirely different outcomes.
7. Petra Feriancová, Judge, 2013, Chair, pedestal, wooden trunk, coins, tessuto, variable dimensions
8-9. Giulia Piscitelli (1965, Naples, Italy)
If the date of the making of Untitled 1989 salutes an epochal turning point in European and global history, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of economic and financial globalization, the video is a video that depicts not a performance but an ordinary action, such as washing dishes, laundry, or another person, performed not by the artist but in the artist’s bathtub. A gesture of care, almost of maintenance, that responds to the simple need to wash away dust from the surface of an object. The sound, in the background, is that of a Super 8 camera, later poured into digital, to which we owe the twilight lighting.
Giulia Piscitelli’s work revolves around the observation of the everyday, the most human aspects that are strongly imprinted in the history and memory of the objects that surround us, framing the events that accompany existence. The historical and symbolic valences of material culture for the sphere of the individual participate quite naturally in collective and social meanings. His practice unfolds as an exercise of care and amends that does not stop the life of objects at the end of their functionality, rejecting obsessive capitalist consumption and transforming the inert object into an organic element, in a poetic form of reading and significance of reality and its blind spots, neglected by everyday life.
Thus Scaletto Organico, 2007, is a stepladder that has belonged to the artist’s family for generations. Once broken, the artist decided to give it status as a work of art, thus giving an organic continuation to his material life.
Mirrored in this image is the anthropomorphic parable of the life of objects and the inevitably destined destination of human existence for consumption, studded, however, with small gestures and unexpected moments of poetry.
Placed in dialogue with Petra Feriancová’s installation, both reflect a work on the archive, personal and others’, in which the material and emotional history inscribed in the material acts as a conduit for a historical or political memory, almost as a contraindication to a biographical and personal signification.
8. Giulia Piscitelli, Scaletto Organico, 2007, Wood, 160 x 80 x 40 cm
9. Giulia Piscitelli, Untitled ’89, 1989, DVD, Super 8 transferred to dvd, sound, 3’22”
10. Katja Strunz (1970, Ottweiler, Germany)
Für Antoine Augustin Cournot (Visionary Fragment), 2003 is part of the Visionary Fragment series and consists of a bronze cast from an abandoned bee hive dedicated to the French philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot, who first theorized the concept of supply and demand in the history of economic analysis.
Strunz’s work is strongly characterized by a reference to time, which rests on the surface of the recycled materials that make up the sculptures. Central to this is the reference to minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture, such as Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969, to which the work in the exhibition alludes. It is not only the repetition and geometric modularity of forms that is a reference, but the reflection on materials and the process of making the work that alternates between industrial and artisanal production processes, which in the case of the beehive, instead of being derived from a mechanized process, as in minimalist sculpture, come from an organic construction. From vegetable to animal, and from animal to human, honey represents a regenerated intellectualism and in the symbol of the beehive alludes to a perfect society.
In the gesture of casting an abandoned beehive in bronze, as well as the historical reference to minimalism, and more generally the act of monumentalizing something organic in slow decay, the concept of time and history that characterizes Strunz’s practice emerges.
Placed in dialogue with Andreas Slominski’s Trap, these works in reflect two different forms of temporality, relationship to history, the viewer, and artistic language: one perpetually suspended, waiting to snap, completely focused in the present, in which the artist is absent and withdraws from the world, leaving the viewer trapped. On the other, a constantly remembered relationship with history, filtered through memory and reference to historical avant-gardes, constructivism, modernism, and minimalism.
10. Katja Strunz, Visionary Fragment (für Antoine Augustin Cournot), 2003, Bronze, 39 x 22 x 24 cm
11. Andreas Slominski (1959, Meppen, Germany).
Biberfalle, 1987, is a beaver trap placed in perpetual waiting. Seemingly harmless or pleasing, the traps Slominski collected and produced from 1984-1985 are meticulously programmed sculptural contraptions and devices that by their suspended presence question the very act of showing by seeking a direct dialogue with the viewer.
Alluding to the rural landscape, wildlife and hunting art, the hunter as well as the artist and his audience share an induced stasis where the work triggers the search for the trace of a passage (a circumstantial paradigm almost): that of its author. A functioning that concurs with the artist’s attempt to achieve a degree of transparency and universality that passes through dislocation and functionality.
Slominski was born and raised in Lower Saxony, training in Hamburg during the 1980s. Alongside the sparkling return to painting, he developed a strand of research devoted to analyzing artistic language and its status, renegotiated by its relationship to the media language of film, television and computers. In this scenario, in which the image and the object acquire a progressive instability, Slominski’s work grafts an entirely opposite rural imaginary, which, by recording the progressive disappearance of the author-artist from the work, proposes a reflection on the legitimacy or otherwise of showing, playing with the absurd presence of a work-trap in a museum.
Both Katja Strunz and Andreas Slominski, in dialogue in this room, are of German nationality. The works confront each other by reflecting a different and opposite concept of time, describing the passing of the baton between two different generations and the different reaction in the face of historical events between them.
11. Andreas Slominski, Biberfalle, 1987, Wood, iron, 26 x 42 x 264 cm
12. Manfred Pernice (1963, Hildesheim, Germany)
Bianca, 2010 is a sculptural formation consisting of a wooden closet internally covered with wallpaper and carpeting lit by a chandelier from which a juice carton, a tin can, a cup, bracelets, and other discarded objects were hung.
Combining disparate elements with symbols of historic modernist architecture, DIY procedures, and materials such as cardboard, marine plywood, or concrete, Pernice’s practice uses applied arts or architecture to investigate the blind spots of reality, conventions of taste, social dynamics, and emotional situations that dot our daily experience.
Eschewing any functionality, these formations are perfectly accomplished, totally autonomous elements in space. Questioning the notion of the exhibition, rather than works or simple sculptures Pernice elaborates sculptural formations, or Gebilde, that associate in a chain of cross-references disparate elements of the urban, commercial, and domestic context assembled in environments or with each other.
Over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, the artist has developed different modules-models that characterize different phases of his production: from the unit-Dosen (of the jar), to Barrieren (barriers), which function as modular motifs within complex environments that are often structured into works composed of three different segments, in which each combines themes and motifs different from the canonical aesthetic (such as buoys, antennas, or concrete bollards).
Born and raised in West Germany, Pernice’s research records the confluence of East and West material culture in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the encounter-clash between forms from both sides of the curtain, focusing not so much on the historical, ideological, or political impact of this crasis, but on the consequences and mechanisms it set in motion.
12. Manfred Pernice, Bianca, 2010, Wooden crate, carpet, wall paper, lamp, electric chord, various found materials, 234 x 105.5 x 85 cm