Venice: Palazzo Franchetti – Genius
Loci Exhibition Lunch Party. The Lisson Gallery and Berengo Studio presented, during the Architectural Biennale, the exhibition
Genius Loci or Spirit of Place, until November 23, curated by Lisson Gallery’s
Greg Hilty and conceived by Patrizia Spadafora of the Berengo Foundation, sculptures
and installations that go beyond the museum or gallery space, addressing
instead the complex spheres of public realm and the built environment. Displaying
a range of major pieces by nineteen artists, both inside and outside the
historic Venetian Palazzo Franchetti. The show includes models, sculptures,
drawings and projects by Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, Daniel Buren, Lawrence
Weiner, Shirazeh Houshiary and Lee Ufan, among others, all of whom have made
significant contributions to art in the public domain through works that
challenge, complement or elucidate their surroundings.
Above: Julian Opie – Jennifer
Waling, 2010. These double-sided animations feature images of a walking female figure.
While these types of screens are typically used outdoors as store signs,
billboards, or on public transport, Opie transforms simple signage and
pictographic information to evoke real people and places.
Genius Loci. Lisson Gallery’s Nicholas
Longsdail standing in the garden of Palazzo Franchetti, behind him Ai Weiwei’s
sculpture entitled Forever, 2014, 1,179 bicycles. Ai has created a monumental
new installation of bicycles on the lawn facing the Accademia Bridge, as part
of his ongoing series, Forever. Ai’s groupings of stainless- steel bikes,
configured in modular shapes and layers of geometrically stacked structures,
refer to the famous ‘Forever’ brand of bicycles that have been
mass-manufactured in Shanghai since 1940. As in other works by Ai, the concepts
of assembling and copying play an important role.
Genius Loci. Shirazeh
Houshiary – Glass Tower (Berengo), 2014 and Spin, 2011. These works are constructed
of hollow and solid blocks of anodized aluminum forming a configuration of
twisting veils that stretch, pierce, tear and curl the space within and
smoothly deform their exterior skin. Houshiary deals with revealing invisible
forms that are somehow otherwise unnoticed in the observable realm.
Genius Loci. Joana
Vasconcelos - Glasshouse, 2014. A house is meant to be a shelter,
a protective, interior space. Vasconcelos’s Glasshouse, a reproduction of a
child’s playhouse made entirely from vitreous material, however, denies the cozy
environment of safety associated with such structures, while also questioning
architecture’s delineation between the public and private spheres of life.
Genius Loci. A detail of Koen
Vanmechelen - In Captivity – C.C.P., 2014.
Known for exhibiting live chickens in his gallery shows, here
Vanmechelen has instead caged glass eggs, produced at Berengo Studio, Venice,
in a steel frame. “The egg is a protected environment and a source of life. Yet
it is also a cage, a restriction from which we have to break free.”
Marina Spadafora, Adriano Berengo, Patrizia
Spadafora and Mara Sartore
Lillo Scaringi Raspagliesi
and Gilda Bojardi
Genius Loci. A detail of, Tatsuo Miyajima - Life (Corps
sans Organes) No.15, 2013. Miyajima’s recent collaboration with an artificial
life expert, Professor Takashi Ikegami of Tokyo University, resulted in a
computer program that generates number sequences responding to the rhythms and
speeds of others in the system. So, instead of a collection of randomized
counting circuits, these networks or clusters of flashing digits come together
to create intelligent, ‘living’ organisms.
Genius Loci. Daniel Buren -
4 Colours at 3 Metres High, 2014. This
newly constructed walkway, which washes the visitors, the walls and floors with
coloured shadows, is a variation on the theme of the pergola or an ‘attrape
soleil’, which Buren has explored in several public works. It plays with outdoor
light, the movement of the sun and changing visual effects.
Genius Loci. Richard
Wentworth - In Plain Sight, 2014.Wentworth has intervened directly in the
exhibition space to create a porous, architectonic wall, punctuated with
numerous recent works from his photographic series Making Do and Getting By
(begun in 1974). The artist uses photography as a means of documenting what
might be called ‘the sculpture of the everyday’ and the examples printed here
include found images taken in Istanbul, Beijing, Spain and London. “I live in a
ready-made landscape,” he remarked early in his career, “and I want to put it
to use.”
Rafael Herman and Roberta
Rossi
Genius Loci. Lee Ufan -
Relatum – She and He, 2007–08. Lee’s sculptural series Relatum is essentially
minimal: each work includes one or more light-colored round stones and dark,
rectangular iron plates. Consisting of untreated stone and iron, Ufan’s
installations explore such dialectical topics as emptiness and the void,
natural and man-made phenomena, while the sculptural compositions themselves
are both silent and richly suggestive.
Goffredo Chiavelli, Carla
Picardi and Aldo Cibic
Sisters, Patrizia and
Marina Spadafora
The flowers