Photograph courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
Milano:
Albergo Diurno Venezia - Fondazione Nicola Trussardi – Sarah Lucas –
Innamemorabiliamumbum exhibition. In collaboration with Miart and FAI, Fondo
Ambiente Italiano, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presented, for three days
only, Sarah Lucas’s site-specific exhibition Innamemorabiliamumbum, curated by
Massimiliano Gioni and Vincenzo de Bellis conceived for the extraordinary
setting of the Albergo Diurno Venezia baths, whose design is attributed to Piero
Portaluppi, re-opened especially for the exhibition.
Ricky Clifton, Sarah Lucas and Beatrice Trussardi
Sarah Lucas – Innamemorabiliamumbum. For the
Albergo Diurno Venezia, Sarah Lucas created a site-specific exhibition, filling
this temple of beauty and personal care with anthropomorphic presences and
bodily simulacra made from stockings, rags, fried eggs, fruit and found
objects, playing with depictions of the female body and challenging stereotypes.
Co-curator Massimiliano Gioni and Beatrice Trussardi
Albergo Diurno Venezia. The Albergo
Diurno Venezia, whose design is attributed to Piero Portaluppi, was built
between 1923 and 1925; in addition to public baths and grooming services
(barber, hairdresser, manicurist, pedicurist), the Albergo Diurno offered a
post office, bureau de change, telephones, baggage check, travel agency, bank,
typing bureau, laundry and ironing, and venues for buying clothes or renting
personal objects. It also had a cutting-edge audio system that played radio
throughout the lounge. The originally envisioned shops gradually moved out,
however, and the Albergo Diurno Venezia definitively closed to the public in
2006. In May 2015 FAI signed an agreement with the City of Milan to develop and
fund a restoration project, in view of reopening the facility to the public. For
the first time in its ninety-year history, the Albergo Diurno housed a
site-specific contemporary art project.
“I like to play around with gender stereotypes [...]
all these meanings are constructs, and they’re quite fragile”
In Sarah
Lucas’s world, no subject seems too delicate and no taboo too sacred. She filled this temple of beauty and personal
care with anthropomorphic presences and bodily simulacra made from stockings,
rags, fried eggs, fruit and found objects, playing with depictions of the
female body and challenging stereotypes.
Martino Gamper and Bethan Laura Wood
Sarah Lucas – Innamemorabiliamumbum. Irreverent and disarming in their extreme simplicity, Lucas’s works created a theater of ambiguity where seemingly commonplace materials became objects of affection that reveal suppressed desires and urges, mocking sexist attitudes and strictures and presenting a fierce critique of the male gaze. An underground world, so fascinating yet so disquieting—was thus the perfect setting for one of her site-specific projects, in a game of mirrors that linked her artworks to the architecture and history of one of the most evocative landmarks in the everyday life of twentieth-century Milan.
Albergo Diurno Venezia