ANDREA GALVANI
SELECTED WORKS 2006 | 2016
Curated by Margherita de Pilati
Galleria CIVICA, Trento
14 October 2016 – 22 January 2017
Opening with PerformanceSaturday 15 October, 7 PM
Day of Contemporary Art, AMACI
After numerous exhibitions at galleries and institutions around the world – such as the Whitney Museum, Art in General, and the Calder Foundation in New York, as well as the Moscow and Central American Biennials – the Mart Museum dedicates a major retrospective to Andrea Galvani. Curated by Margherita de Pilati, the exhibition presents artworks produced over the last decade, in addition to new projects uniquely designed for Galleria Civica, the Museum’s third space.
The Institutional Project
Galleria Civica of Trento has dedicated 2016 to some of the most interesting and active contemporary artists. Through a series of monographic exhibitions organized by Margherita de Pilati, the Galleria took stock of recent work by Stefano Cagol and staged the premier of emerging artist Wyatt Kahn at a European public institution. Now, for the first time in Europe, Galleria Civica proudly directs its focus to Andrea Galvani, one of the most important international Italian artists of his generation, illustrating over ten years of research with anunprecedented survey exhibition.
Through an ongoing partnership between the Mart Museum and Art Verona, this show emerges from a joint effort to support and promote contemporary Italian art. Andrea Galvani is the 2015 prize recipientselected by the Museum to represent the outstanding artistic talent of today. As an extension of institutional synergy, the art fair and the exhibition willopen to the public simultaneously on Friday, 14 October.
Additionally, Galleria Civica will host two events during Art Verona:
-Grand Opening on the Day of Contemporary Art, AMACI | Saturday, 15 October, 7:00 PMOn this occasion, the impressive installation The End (Action #1) becomes the site of a public performance, orchestrated by the artist in collaboration with some of the greatest voices of Italy’s experimental music scene and the F.A. Bonporti Conservatory of Music in Trento
-Private matinee for press and collectors | Sunday, 16 October, 10:30 AMThis event, co-hosted by Art Verona, is a special visit to the exhibition with the artist; Mart Museum director Gianfranco Maraniello; curator Margherita de Pilati; and art critic Giorgio Verzotti, who will introduce the artist’s work in the accompanying monographic catalogue, soon to be published by the Museum
The Exhibition
Through a compact, interdisciplinary itinerary including photography, sculpture, drawing, performance, video and audio installations, Andrea Galvani: Selected Works 2006 | 2016documents collective action, visionary experiments, and physical phenomena in which the monumental is paradoxically ephemeral. Relationships between experience, physical effort, risk, and limitations of media and place in the orchestration of site-specific actions are crucial to the development of complex projects, which often result from collaborations with institutions, universities, and research laboratories.
In the space of Galleria Civica, Galvani reconfigures and re-contextualizes a selection ofworks from major collectionsand presents a series of new interventions produced in collaboration with the museum. The galleries are transformed into a laboratory for exploration and analysis with a number of the artist’s most acclaimed international investigations:The End Trilogy (2013-2016), A Few Invisible Sculptures (2012-2016), Higgs Ocean (2008-2011), and Deconstruction of a Mountain (2004-2016) engage in dialogue for the first time.
The exhibition opens with The End (Action #1), a large and spectacular site-specific video installation occupying almost the entire first floor. Funded by Art in General’s New Commission Program, The End (Action #1) was first introduced in New York during Frieze Art Fair in May 2015. To realize the project, Galvani coordinated with local cameramen to film the sunrise along the eastern coastline of five different countries in Central America. An homage to the heliocentric model of our solar system championed by Galileo Galilei, father of modern cosmology, the event was filmed on the anniversary of Galileo’s death on 8 January 1642, in over 30 different locations simultaneously. Discrepancies between atmospheric conditions, the sensitivity of 16mm film technology, and the movements of each individual manifest as a prism of time and space. The architecture of The End (Action #1) was conceived as an ephemeral monument – seven pedestals of light designed to be used by seven vocalists whose voices activate and enlivened the space at different times throughout the exhibition. Galleria Civica presents the first performance to the public during the opening reception on Saturday, 15 October at 7:00 PM.
The route continues as an immersion into darkness. The length of the hall is bathed in an otherworldly shade of cobalt blue – emanating from blown glass, neon illuminates a complex mathematical equation. This new site-specific work represents the ongoing collaboration between Galvani and renown astrophysicist Eloy Ayón-Beato, Professor for the Department of Physics at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, a leading expert in black holes and gravitational physics.
Audiences are cast into a dimension that is both conceptually dense and emotionally charged, concrete yet metaphysical. Through an extraordinary selection of works, many of which have never been seen before in Italy, the path continues on the gallery’s lower level, revealing the strength and coherence of Galvani’s effort in the last ten years.
Sometimes, the biggest limits that surround us are physically very small or invisible: psychological, geographical, or political territories. They are apparently simple, yet impenetrable structures, insurmountable distances, dimensions inaccessible or unknown. In geometry, when one approaches a point in Euclidean space, one never reaches the end. This exhibition is an extended encounter, a descent to the depths of an infinite void, but also the vertigo of disclosure: a new state of power, a new perspective, an act of retribution. – Andrea Galvani
Andrea Galvani
(Verona, 1973) Lives and works in New York and Mexico City. Drawing from other disciplines and often assuming scientific methodologies, his conceptual research informs his use of photography, video, audio, drawing,sculpture, installation, performance, and text-based works. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York; 4th Moscow Biennale forContemporary Art; the Meditations Biennale, Poznan, Poland; 9th Biennial of Contemporary Art of Nicaragua; Art in General, New York; Aperture Foundation, New York; The Calder Foundation, New York; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento, Italy; MACRO Museum, Rome; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; Oslo Plads, Copenhagen; among others. In 2011, he received the New York Exposure Prize and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has been a visiting artist at NYU (2009-10) and has completed several artist residencies in New York City, including Location One International Artist Residency Program (2008), the LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2009), and the M.I.A. Artist Space Program/Columbia University School of the Arts (2010).
Galleria CIVICA Trento e ADAC
Via Belenzani 44
38122 Trento
T+39 0461 985511
+ 39 800 397760
F +39 0461 277033
Schedule
Tuesday / Sunday 10-13 / 14-18
Monday closed
Tickets
Entrance: 2 €
Free: Mart Membership, children up to age 14
Free admission every first Sunday of the month
Mart Press Office
T +39 0464 454124
Special Thanks
Autonomous Province of Trento
Municipality of Trento
Municipality of Rovereto
In Collaboration with
Trentino Marketing