Rosa Barba

GIO MARCONI GALLERY
via Tadino 15
September 18–October 31

Rosa Barba, Enigmatic Whistler, 2009, 16-mm film with optical sound, 2 minutes.

“Stating the Real Sublime,” Rosa Barba’s first solo exhibition at this gallery, presents some new works as well as a few of her earlier pieces, including films shot in the Mojave Desert (They Shine and Waiting Grounds, both 2007) and 16-mm projections such as Machine Vision Seekers, 2004. One of her latest offerings, One Way Out, 2009, consists of a projector connected to a film that stridently winds its way through the inside of a large metal cylinder extending from the ceiling. Enigmatic Whistler, 2009, also comprises a projector resting on the floor; it is wrapped in 16-mm film in a stranglehold that prevents it from carrying out its intended function.

Both these new works project a skewed band of light onto the walls, and in this Barba exposes these machines as objects that can emit light but can no longer serve to admit the viewer into the dreamlike world of a film. These are machines that exhibit only their essential components––light, sound, and mechanical movements––in a fashion that eschews narration and prefers fragmentation. While Barba evokes a world of self-sufficient technologies, the viewer must find a way to respond to the rhythms of the machines here and manage the spatiotemporal short circuit the works incite.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Florian Schmidt

GALLERIA SUZY SHAMMAH
via San Fermo / via Moscova, 25
September 18–November 14

Florian Schmidt, Carousel, 2009, vinyl, lacquer, acrylic, canvas, wood, 49 x 39 x 49".

For his first solo exhibition in Italy, the young Austrian painter Florian Schmidt, known for an analytic and occasionally site-specific approach, uses materials such as canvas, cardboard, and wood to broaden his examination of painting by cultivating a subtle poetry inspired by chance. In the three nearly identical rooms of the gallery, the artist offers several pieces that blend aspects of painting and sculpture. Carousel (all works 2009) is a painted triangular wooden structure that stands on a circular piece of canvas; Untitled (Bridge 1 and 2) are collages, comprising wooden slats, vinyl, paper, and wire; One is a painting with a large circular hole in the center of the canvas.

By reusing fragments from exhibited artworks and incorporating them in other pieces on view––for example, the circle missing from the center of One could be the piece of canvas used in Carousel––the exhibition encourages the viewer to retrace the artist’s process and to question how the media of painting and sculpture are determined and defined. Schmidt’s display of their interrelationship is not just an updated exercise in abstraction. Instead, by merging different levels of format, structure, and style, it can be seen as a forward-looking experiment by a painter looking for new perspectives on his medium. The title of the show, “Voice,” gestures toward the advent of a statement, one that has been articulated but not yet answered.

— Barbara Buchmaier

David Adamo

N.O. GALLERY
Via Matteo Bandello 18,
September 18–November 15

View of “David Adamo,” 2009. From left: Untitled (Concert Harp #2), 2009; Untitled (Cane), 2009.

David Adamo’s first solo exhibition in Italy is installed in a small, muffled room dedicated to site-specific projects. Without any windows, the gallery appears as a cubic volume carved out of the depths of the building; with Adamo’s works in it, the space functions as a Wunderkammer. Here, a concert harp hangs from the ceiling and a cane whittled away by an ax rests against the wall, surrounded by its own splinters, a memory as much of the artistic gesture as of the implement’s original use.

Just outside the room, a tiny blue stool is barely visible, while in the gallery office a little red shoe, overturned next to the table, does not belong to a charming assistant but is a bronze cast, it too part of an orderly disorder directed by the artist. With his deconstructed evocation of the readymade and his ironic interest in art fetishes (from Warhol’s little shoes to Beuys’s walking stick), the artist, who works on sculpture as process and performative practice, recalls the actions of a dancer who has developed a sense of the stage that enables him to deal with the space as a pared-down set, the strength of which is derived from what remains of the action.

What we experience as viewers is not just the residue of “artmaking” but also relationships of meaning (or nonmeaning) that emerge from the interpretation of the object in space. Adamo makes visible various contrasting phenomena that both attract and repel: static-dynamic, mute-sonorous, absolute-relative, presence-absence. And one has no desire to leave the room.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Paola Nicolin

Christian Holstad

GALLERIA CIVICA DI MODENA
Corso Canalgrande 103
September 20–January 10

Christian Holstad, Learning to Read Between the Lines, 2008–2009, pencil on newspaper, gold leaf, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Christian Holstad’s first solo show in Italy, titled “I Confess,” is something of a retrospective, given the large number of his works on view from the past ten years, but it also offers an additional view of his output: Every piece can be considered in light of a possible confession. The admission in question seems to be a spiritual turning point for the artist. In the first of two contiguous spaces, Holstad presents a votive, chapel-like work that comprises planks of wood nailed together to form walls. Twelve new drawings are affixed on these walls, essentially the twelve stations of a via crucis wherein the protagonists seem to be deformed and crippled outcasts who nonetheless find a possibility of redemption in the light of the pure gold brushstrokes that surround them.

The second space is also measured off in twelve stages, each of which is characterized by a group of sculptures made from used clothing, clothes hangers, various accessories, and snakes that consist of rich fabrics. Some seem to be soaked in urine (although perhaps it is only faded yellow paint), and through a sophisticated synesthetic process the viewer can nearly smell the acrid odor, as if it were a reference to the limitations of the human condition.

With these themes of creativity and desecration, the exhibition might be perceived as a mystical journey, indeed. However, in the press materials the curator, Milovan Farronato, cautions the viewer, provocatively referencing Kafka and Saint Augustine, and their views that even an authentic confession must necessarily communicate a certain measure of falsehood. Here, truth and pretense seem to be two sides of the same coin.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Jannis Kounellis

ALFONSO ARTIACO
Piazza dei Martiri 58
September 16–October 24

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2009, wood with gold leaf, metallic netting, hats, steel beam, coats, hooks, dimensions variable.

The evocative value of memory, the semantic richness of symbols, and the metamorphic properties of material inform Jannis Kounellis’s work and his latest exhibition. The show includes a site-specific interpretation of one of his early pieces, Tragedia Civile (Civil Tragedy), 1975, which was first shown at Lucio Amelio Gallery, in whose space Alfonso Artiaco Gallery is now located. The new, untitled work underscores the recurrent elements and polysemic approach that are activated in Kounellis’s pieces through a play of ideas between history and representation, totality and fragment.

Pieces of gilded wooden planks stand out against the back wall of the gallery, the gold leaf giving the objects a certain hieratic quality, as if they are references to the Byzantine tradition and the artist’s Greek origins. The planks also suggest a process of dematerialization, which is immediately contradicted by the fencelike structure behind them and on which the objects are hooked, in turn giving emphasis to the wall. This classical compositional rigor is compromised by the introduction of a tranche de vie: Several ordinary black overcoats and hats climb up a steel pole in front of the planks. These are elements that appear as residual traces of an absent humanity; they recall an enormous tragedy, perhaps, as the work taps into a collective memory, and the atemporal dimension of myth.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

Ariel Orozco

FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY
Piazza Montevecchio 16
October 1–November 21

Ariel Orozco, Loop, 2009, three wheelbarrows, birdseed, canary, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Ariel Orozco’s first solo exhibition in Italy encompasses various socioeconomic concerns with objects and images that subvert the viewer’s initial impressions. While the artist’s early body of work was defined by public acts tied intimately to recurrent metaphors, the development of his practice has recently switched toward an emphasis on exhibiting the results of process-based works, avoiding documentation of the artist’s presence altogether.

Personal memory confronts reality and social convictions, yielding fragile outcomes, in pieces such as Déjà Vu (all works 2009), an installation that overturns the boundaries between performative actions, sculpture, and photography. A flashy (yet broken) bicycle lies outside the gallery’s entrance—scars and rust marring this otherwise barely used item, as if the bicycle didn’t finish its first ride. In the farthest of the gallery space’s four rooms, an identical bicycle bears the same scars, an attempt to provoke the titular déjà vu experience. The work is didactically completed by photographic documentation of the action that brought about the damage. The recurrence of symbolism in Orozco’s work is fairly explicit in Turista, a photographic sequence depicting a bicycle wheel spinning through a vehicle graveyard, but also makes an appearance in Loop, an installation consisting of a living canary in a room occupied by nearly two tons of birdseed, underlining the disproportion between availability and necessity.

— Francesco Stocchi

Gianni Colombo

CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Piazza Mafalda di Savoia
September 16–January 10

Gianni Colombo, Topoestesia, 1970/2009, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Castello di Rivoli’s Gianni Colombo retrospective is his first at a public museum in Italy, though the country had seen previous exhibitions featuring the artist alongside his brother, designer Joe Colombo. This Turin exhibition thus fills a research-based gap regarding an artist who, particularly as a member of kinetic-art collective Gruppo T (founded in Milan in 1959), radically focused his artmaking on what became an essential design premise: to place the viewer at the center of the work. The resulting pieces are functional “machines” that led their users to perform a series of discrete actions and movements of the body and the eye—beginning with 1959’s Rilievi intermutabili (Interchangeable Reliefs) and Strutturazioni pulsanti (Pulsating Structuralizations).

Then came Colombo’s environments—reconstructed in the exhibition—such as his first work expanded into the third dimension, the Strutturazione cinevisual abitabile (Habitable Kine-visual Structuralization), 1964. The practicable, performative space—assailing all who enter with overwhelming sensory stimuli—developed.

Colombo’s desanctification of the artwork, his reflections on the role of the viewer as an active agent, and his delving into relationships between space, time, and body are themes that still course through today’s art. An interview with Olafur Eliasson, published in the exhibition catalogue, is, in this sense, an indication of fertile connections with later artists.

In turn, Colombo’s influences are also on view; within the chronological arrangement of his investigations, from 1953 up to his final work (Opus incertum, 1992), viewers first encounter the artist’s earliest and lesser-known works: ceramics, drawings, and felt pieces from the 1950s that reference everything from art informel to Fontana and Klee.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Artur Zmijewski

GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN
Limmatstrasse 270
October 31–December 23

Artur Zmijewski, Democracies, 2009, still from a twenty-channel color video, 2 hours 26 minutes.

“Where is the world?!” wails a group of Palestinian women in Jerusalem during a weekly protest against Israeli occupiers in Artur Zmijewski’s singularly brilliant new video Democracies, 2009, one of two documentaries by the Polish artist that compose this exhibition. The women’s angry lament is a sobering corrective to 1980s-era sing-alongs like “We Are the World.” But their cry is also echoed by the marching crowds in the twenty-some public gatherings of varying political tenor—street demonstrations, state funerals, war reenactments, nationalistic football rioting, and mass religious services—that Zmijewski and a small crew shot in Europe and the Middle East over the past three years.

As individual works of up to ten minutes each, the videos feature Polish feminists pushing strollers while their jackboot-wearing countrymen decry them as Nazis, drunk German football fans exalting their flag while silenced Turkish kids watch on, and Israeli peaceniks facing off with their enraged, Arab-hating brothers. As a collective film running more than two hours, Democracies is a formal and political tour de force: examining the common visual language of protest—flags, religious paraphernalia, drums, and riot gear (as well as the diverging ones: reggae on the left, military bearing and haircuts on the right), while exploring how democratic citizenry responds to power and an often outsize lack of it.

In Two Monuments, 2009, Zmijewski tightens his focus, if not his ambition. The artist held two gender-separate workshops for Polish immigrants in Ireland and the working-class Irish who felt their skills were being supplanted. Both groups designed a public monument describing their relationship to the labor market and to each other. As Zmijewski films the women (mostly domestics) and the men (construction workers) brashly or haltingly discussing their feelings of resentment and powerlessness (“Out of work at the moment, and can’t get a job ’cause of you Polish”), building the monuments, and celebrating with drink and an impromptu jam session after, he delivers an uneasy visual essay on the global labor market—among political systems that tout democracy but whose economic policies rarely deliver it—that is as deft as it is dismaying. “Where is the world?!” the artist seems to be saying. Perhaps here, and as shell-shocked as ever.

— Quinn Latimer

Stefan Burger

FREYMOND-GUTH & CO.
Brauerstrasse 51
October 29–December 24

Stefan Burger, Besser arm dran als arm ab (It’s better to be poor than lose your arm), 2009, ink-jet print, anodized aluminum, text, 22 4/5 x 14 1/5 x 2 4/5".

Contemporary artworks that reference John Cage’s seminal 4' 33" are a dime a dozen, yet few are imbued with the brilliantly pithy spirit of the original, from 1952. So it was with some surprise that I found myself spellbound by Stefan Burger’s 4' 33" (Dormicum IV), 2009. For the video, beautifully shot by Gabriel Sandru and Tolga Dilsiz, the artist takes the titular sleeping pill off camera, then sits down at a spotlit piano and begins to nod off. As Burger swoons over the keyboard in a physical struggle to stay awake, his movements strangely ape the familiar dramatic gestures of a concert pianist caught in flagrante with a piece of music. Below the swooping drama of the top half of Burger’s body, however, the artist’s hands are mostly still. In homage to Cage’s conceptual gesture, Burger’s nodding off takes on a clever and weirdly poetic cast, while simultaneously poking fun at the ubiquity of the composer’s work.

Traces of this marriage of wit and poetry appear throughout Burger’s other artworks as well. Brutvorrichtung für Kleingruppen im Kunstsystem (Brooding Device for Small Groups Within the System of Art), 2009, is a series of wooden chairs with handmade cushions that have bronze casts of avocados dangling from their corners. The chairs are meant to be utilized by the gallery staff until they are sold, but the beauty of the piece lies in the strange charge of its title (Burger’s titles tend to be awesome) and its stranger fruit. Meanwhile, a motley crew of framed ink-jet prints of objects and architecture are upstaged by a glass vitrine with the phrase TOTAL-LIQUIDATION running across it. Indeed, the well-worn green silk lining the interior of the former window-display box is bare but for the spectral, bleached-out geometric shapes that indicate the former presence of goods now long gone. In this piece, Burger’s impish and electric doubts—about the making, selling, and showing of art—are everywhere, even if the wares are not.

— Quinn Latimer