Rehang : Archives
Rehang, when a number of rooms in the permanent display at the Collezione Maramotti will be rearranged, offers the chance to open up a temporary exhibition to the public on the ground floor, featuring documents, books, works and objects conserved in the Collezione’s Archives and Art Library, living places of knowledge and in-depth study.
This diverse exhibition, which is naturally in no way comprehensive, establishes a dialogue between these materials and a number of works in the permanent collection, highlighting the vitality of the creative process of artworks and the permeable connections between the various groups of elements that form the Collezione.
A number of exciting examples have been selected from the wealth of bibliographic and archive documentation, without critical or philological objectives, but with a view to offering a broader and more detailed overview of the work. Artist’s books, catalogues, letters, sketches, photographs, videos and other materials are pieced together to tell a story of artistic creation.
Projects by ten artists will be featured: Claudio Parmiggiani, Peter Halley, Barry X Ball, Giulio Paolini, Vito Acconci, Jason Dodge, Enzo Cucchi, Evgeny Antufiev, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Krištof Kintera.
Room 1. Mapping the World
“It is one of the simplest procedures:
having removed the picture the removal remains
the presence of the removal
having removed the work we look at the painting
that which fills the frame in its presence can be observed once it is absent."
The words of the art critic Paolo Fossati introduce Claudio Parmiggiani’s work entitled Delocazione, establishing an ideal connection with the Collezione’s Rehang and opening the exhibition itinerary together with Peter Halley. Despite their diverse formal outcomes, the two artists are brought together here because of their shared critical reflection on certain themes ranging from painting to the representation of conceptual maps, interpreted as social archetypes in the work of Halley and as ironic geographical landscapes in the works of Parmiggiani. The bright pop colours of Parmiggiani’s Tavole Zoogeografiche also forge a link with the works of Peter Halley, particularly his large piece entitled Powder, accompanied by a series of original sketches and a number of texts by the artist that highlight how his theories on contemporary society are manifested through an action that is simultaneously pictorial, conceptual and linguistic. Halley’s painting The Western Sector (1989-90), on the second floor of the permanent display, is represented here by a small polaroid with the artist in his studio. In the painting leaning against the wall we can recognize the black square by Kazimir Malevich, an icon to which Claudio Parmiggiani’s style also pertains.
Room 2. Architectural Appropriations
The second room houses a series of autograph projects, ‘tools of the trade’ and photographs documenting the design and construction of works by Vito Acconci, Giulio Paolini and Barry X Ball during the opening of the Collezione Maramotti in 2007. The display also features the project by Jason Dodge, whose 2013 work A permanently open window is not housed in the Collezione premises, but in the former transmission tower of an industrial area, now home to a shopping centre, located around one hundred metres from the Collezione.
Architecture and the relationship between the space and the artwork are themes shared by all four artists in this room. Barry X Ball’s analytical process reveals the architectural references used for the creation of his Matthew Barney and the meticulous construction of chests for storing his works.
Vito Acconci’s original project highlights the individual stages in the creation of Two or three structures that can hook on to a room and support a political boomerang, an audio installation presented for the first time in 1978 at the Galleria Mario Diacono in Bologna. The working process becomes apparent here in the arrangement of the gallery space and its interaction with visitors. The same gallery in Bologna also hosted an exhibition by Giulio Paolini in the same year with the work Idem VII, now on display on the first floor of the Collezione, together with Scene di conversazione.
Room 3. Inner Landscapes
“Every so often art has to stop and rest in order to gather up the latest information on origin; to familiarize with prehistoric man!... with his physical appearance, his daily life. This adventure requires geography, a journey through different lands.”
The words of Enzo Cucchi, taken from the artist’s book Vitebsk/Harar, introduce us to the third room, where we find a comparison between Southern places and Northern landscapes.
The section dedicated to Cucchi, an artist who is well represented in the permanent display, illustrates the phases involved in the creation of the artist’s book published in 1984. The photographs, contemporary newspaper cuttings, the text with poems by Arthur Rimbaud, the article by Donald Judd and the Kazimir Malevich catalogue become tools for reflecting on the painter’s role and a symbolic journey through art and poetry.
The chthonic images in Cucchi’s book can be found again, in transmuted forms, in ritual fetishes in the works by Evgeny Antufiev for his 2013 project, now partly reinstalled on the second floor of the Collezione. The numerous elements on display played a key part in the creation of the exhibition and artist's book, an essential tool for understanding the style of the young Russian artist in the use of everyday objects and the revival of materials that, combined and hybridized, go beyond time, becoming 'sacred'.
Room 4. Popular Archetypes
The last room in the itinerary is devoted to Romanian twins Gert & Uwe Tobias and to the Prague-based artist Krištof Kintera. With a diverse wealth of documentary material, it illustrates the process involved the creation of the two exhibitions held by the Collezione Maramotti in 2009 and 2017 respectively and now reinstalled for Rehang.
The themes explored by Tobias and Kintera are very different, but something unites the research of these artists: in both projects we find works veiled with reflections that are both ironic and profound, amplified by “popular” forms and relationships channelled strongly and directly from the work to viewers, thereby making them play an active part in the process. The iconography of Northern and Middle European folklore also characterizes their research, but while for the Tobias twins it represents a consistent formal element, in Kintera it is the starting point for questioning the relationship between nature and culture and the balances in contemporary society.