BEPI GHIOTTI | CASTELLO DI RIVARA

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'i Bui' black paint, XVII-XVIII century painting, wood, gold. 2016

Bepi Ghiotti

MATERIA PRIMA

30.10 - 27.11.2016

Castello di Rivara 

Museo d'Arte Contemporanea

www.castellodirivara.it | info@castellodirivara.it

tel +39 0124 31122

P.zza Sillano 2,10080 Rivara, Torino.

Materia Prima could be seen as one of the many possible outcomes of Bepi Ghiotti's work

on the neobaroque space of Castle of Rivara. Only one of the possible results, reasonably,

determined by having to set a time limit to his tireless research. Yet, there is a moment

before, at the beginning of the artist's operation on the location, in whichtime has already

overwhelmingly taken its share as a raw material. Bepi's trained photographer eye

recognizes the majesty of time, which is manifested in the traces of life and art deposited in

the Castle's ambient by the passage of time. His work thus concentrates on an attempt to

resurface the essence of this space, almost sweeping away, one after the other, all the

layers of recent history.

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  '500W'  02 Kodak Carousel projector, loaders, wall. 2016

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'Cianotipi'  Cyanotype on paper 122x82cm. 2016

Room after room, wall after wall, Ghiotti analyzes the geometries, listening to them breathe.

Like a chemist in an ancient laboratory, he captures the light coming through the windows in

different hours throughout the day. The light continuously changes, as does the perception

of the architectures, thus delivering an essential experience of the location, through the

artist's installation. The rooms of the neo-baroque villa, similar to living organisms, bring out

the primary elements of their physiology: the asynchronous pulse of the two projectors

beaming pure light, installed in the entryway; along the electromagnetic vibrations captured

with ancient gestures on the cyanotypes, in the partial views of faces and landscapes that

can only be imagined through scratches of light, torn away from the black of darkness, of

oblivion.

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima -  'Cianotipi' - Cyanotype on paper 122x82cm. 2016

Through this intervention, which is almost an archaeological operation on the location,soaked in anthropological suggestions and ancient techniques, Bepi Ghiotti 
reveals the heart to the audience. The viewer is led to the “source” of the identity of those rooms from the Eighteen hundreds, recovered through the artist's tenacious experience inside the Caslte and that of all its physical and unworldly dwellers. Walking through those rooms, among objects revealing the essence, one has the clear feeling of being inside a fully developing process, deeply interconnected with the ponderously conquered relationship the artist has had with the Castle of Rivara, day after day, 
in the resounding loneliness of those huge, empty rooms.

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  '500W'  02 Kodak Carousel projector, loaders, wall. 2016

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'Cianotipi'  Cyanotype on paper 122x82cm. 2016

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'Cianotipi'  Cyanotype on paper 122x82cm. 2016

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'i Bui'  black paint, XVII-XVIII century painting, wood, gold. 206

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'i Bui' black paint, XVII-XVIII century painting, wood, gold. 2016

Bepi Ghiotti - Materia Prima  'i Bui' black paint, XVII-XVIII century painting, wood, gold. 2016

Castello di Rivara 

Museo d'Arte Contemporanea

www.castellodirivara.it | info@castellodirivara.it

tel +39 0124 31122

P.zza Sillano 2,10080 Rivara TO

orari: 10-13 | 14-18

http://www.artnet.com/artists/bepi-ghiotti/

https://www.artsy.net/artist/bepi-ghiotti

www.bepighiotti.com

ICEBERG PROJECTS | BROKEN FLAG

Iceberg Projects

AA Bronson, White Flag #2, 2015. Rabbit skin glue, Champagne chalk, and raw honey on wool, cotton and metal grommet on linen, 112 x 181 cm. Work courtesy of the collection of Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons, New York. Image courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo: © Andrea Rossetti.

Broken Flag November 6–December 6, 2016 Opening: Sunday, November 6, 4–7pm Closing: Sunday, December 4, 4–7pm Iceberg Projects  7714 N Sheridan Road Chicago, IL 60626 Hours: Saturdays 11am–5pm icebergchicago.com Works by: AA Bronson, Art+ Positive, Sanford Biggers, Elijah Burgher, Zachary Cahill, Noah Davis, Paul Heyer, Jonathan Horowitz, Kerry James Marshall, William J. O'Brien, Cheryl Pope, Raymond Saunders, Patti Smith and David Wojnarowicz Curated by Dr. Daniel Berger and Dr. Omar Kholeif Not to hail a barren sky. Sifting cloth is weeping red The mourning veil is waving high a field of stars and tears we've shed In the sky a broken flag, Children wave and raise their arms We'll be gone but they'll go on and on and on and on and on "Broken Flag," Patti Smith (1979) Broken Flag emerged out of a conversation about queer identity in an ever fractured and precarious American landscape. The flag has historically operated as an allegory in culture and in contemporary art (with Jasper Johns being the most obvious of examples)—but here the flag is stretched to new formal and imaginal limits. In this case, the flag becomes an emblem and an allegory for the possibility of a utopic future, one which we hope will not verge into teetering collapse. These pieces of fabric, glitter, and cloth represent an identity subsumed by late capitalism; they are meta-objects, remarking on histories, which are no longer visible (disappeared in the homogeneity of many an(other) identity). They speak to hopefulness and ebullience, as well as to collapse and hopelessness. Where shall we go? And shall we go together or alone? This project explores states of being and ways of seeing. How do we devise a sense of identity if the muddy water before us continues to prescribe and define binaries that cannot contain us? Shall we create archipelagos that facilitate creolization: spaces to mend the cracked euphemism once denoted by our idols? On the verge of a new election, a new America, post-Orlando, post-Ferguson, what have we learned and what will emerge in this new world? The artists herein are a cast of colorful characters—pleading and divergent souls, who welcome, greet and distort the visitor upon arrival. Closing event: Further details to be announced. A limited edition publication of 150 copies will be published alongside the exhibition.

SPACE | THE STONREFRONT GALLERY

SPACES—The Storefront Gallery

Spaces is a feature of art-agenda that proposes a thematic examination of galleries based on the analysis of their physical and spatial configurations. Every two months, art-agenda publishes a new reflection on the spatial characteristics of galleries, their architecture, identity, and relation to their historical and geographical context. The sixth iteration of Spaces explores the storefront gallery.





Let us presume that there is a substantive difference between a “store” and a “gallery,” and that one might occupy the other (either parasitically or symbiotically) in a manner somehow distinctive, and see if this holds up as a hypothesis. As defining characteristics of the store-as-gallery, I suggest the following: an architectural space with street-level, pedestrian access, existing in the context of other commercial retail outlets, and conspicuously deploying plate-glass picture windows that theatricalize the goods, or artifacts, contained within.


Let’s start with some background to this apparently familiar form, in 1851 at the “Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations” held at the newly erected Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, a useful coincidence of a number of the political, technical, and commercial concerns that will have great ramifications for the design of both stores and exhibitions as we recognize them today. For the first time on this scale, and in an overtly public way, the “Great Exhibition” stages all manner of different valences of object, machine, industrial process, raw material, and fabricated product, all competing for both trade and casually distracted interest while also performing as a self-contained temporary monument to imperial power. Rather than enclosing singular items in clustered display cabinets, architect Joseph Paxton’s rapidly fabricated demountable structure—made possible by advances in sheet glass and cast-iron manufacture(1)—demarcated all of its contents as both of note and of implicit value, clearly lit and dramatically displayed. (An anecdotal measure of the success of these new viewing conditions: as many as five times the number of people paid to see the casts of the Elgin Marbles in the Palace’s second location in Sydenham, alongside well-designed household wares offered for sale, than saw the originals for free in the notoriously dingy British Museum.)(2) By taking on the conditions of a vitrine at architectural scale, Paxton’s Crystal Palace enunciated many of the key design concerns that would vex museum and department store designers (the latter a format then gaining in traction, particularly in France) for years to come.


“Any store in a modern town, with its elegant windows all displaying useful and pleasing objects, is much more aesthetically enjoyable than all those passéist exhibitions which have been so lauded everywhere.”

—Giacomo Balla, The Futurist Universe, 1918.(3)


The challenge of performative facades and a new, transparent architecture that theatricalized both goods and customers (and the new form of publicness it gave rise to) appears to have caught the imagination of artists from the second decade of the twentieth century: Surrealists extending their visual contextualization of publications from their jackets to the windows that displayed them (from René Magritte’s 1934 cover designs for André Breton(4) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1945 window display for Brentano’s bookstore in New York, again for a publication by Breton); the Futurists championing the consolidated display of industrially manufactured artifacts (Giacomo Balla’s attitude was not atypical—Fernand Léger was to celebrate the elaborately composed artifact’s “inutility” in this context in his “Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life” of 1923); and the Constructivists’ and the Bauhaus’s willing fluidity between “fine art” and industrial design (Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s agency Reklam-Konstuctor [Advertising-constructor], for example).


Emerging from a Constructivist context, Austrian-born émigré Frederick Kiesler explicitly embraced the shared ground between aesthetics, fine art, and commodity display. Kiesler’s window designs for Saks Fifth Avenue in New York (1928) were his financial salvation and revolutionized commercial window display in the process.(5) Gone were the typological cavalcades of the kind documented by Eugène Atget in Paris, and in their place was an all-encompassing visual system running the length of the building’s façade, 14 interconnected window spaces built into an abstracted theatrical set, staging select items (a single jacket draped over a chair, say) as fetishized elements within a singular idealized context. The uncluttered and unashamedly aestheticized modernity of the presentation was a sensation, the three-week commission remaining installed for the next nine years, and so successful that in 1930 Kiesler was able to publish an intelligent guidebook, succinctly titled Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display.(6) Despite the store’s historical obligation to exhibit a myriad of wares to a passing crowd, Kiesler realized that what it contained for sale would be favorably preconditioned by the desire already projected across the glass of the façade; the first transaction would be sealed in the street. Three blocks north, in 1934, Phillip Johnson’s provocative “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA would further muddy the water with its elegant display of mass-produced, machine-fabricated artifacts, with both catalogue and wall labels including details of where each of the exhibits could be sourced and at what unit price, with the smaller, cheaper items being available for the public to handle.


Through the 1940s and ’50s, a number of Italian architects would further revolutionize display techniques and perpetuate this oscillation between commodity presentation, store design, and re-orchestrations of classical collections. By taking objects out of vitrines or off defensive staging platforms and articulating them in a shared, dynamic architectural space, these designers idealized and aestheticized the museum as a container both of intrigue and value (in all senses of the word). Carlo Scarpa’s use of strategically hung colored blanking plates to pick out selected profiles of sculptures floated on slender pillars, for example, or Franco Albini’s pneumatic articulations of classical fragments in space were spatial conceits that were also applied to store designs for Olivetti (in Venice in 1957 and Paris in 1958, respectively), amongst Scarpa and Albini’s other commissions.(7) In New York, another Italian design practice, BBPR, would once again cause a public sensation on Fifth Avenue by inviting members of the public to encase themselves in a vitrine: open to the street but apparently framed from within the store, the concession for Italian typewriter brand Olivetti blurred the boundary of inside and outside, creating a very public exhibition of the desirability of a luxury product, articulations of intimacy and spectacle familiar from BBPR’s redesigned exhibition displays at Castello Sforzesco in Milan (1954-6). Having moved from Italy to Brazil, architect and curator of the São Paulo Museum of Art Lina Bo Bardi did away with walls altogether (also an obstruction to Kiesler’s theories of Tensionism)(8) with her staging of the museum’s historical painting collection on individual glass sheets—each economically clamped at its base in a cube of concrete.(9)


In the UK, moves by the so-called YBAs in the late 1980s to co-opt both the empty real estate and commercial logic of retail spaces set the tone in the following decade for local councils to reinvigorate the proliferation of vacant units in shopping areas by offering short-term leases to artists in what has now become a prosaic quid pro quo of urban gentrification. It is hard to see how even long-term projects can escape these market forces—stepping into the Dia-commissioned and maintained The Broken Kilometer (1979) by Walter De Maria in New York recently, the real-estate pressure of the swarm of upmarket boutiques that surround it is palpable, the preservation of a space for (non-monetized) contemplation seemingly untenable in such an environment. These concerns had been archly theatricalized by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick’s Wrong Gallery project (2002–05), living parasitically in two and a half square feet of exhibition space behind a permanently closed glass door onto the street (actually the back door of Andrew Kreps gallery in Chelsea, New York) and hosting compact exhibitions until they, too, were evicted. Jennifer Bolande’s West of Rome Public Art project intervened in this boundary between forced removal and gentrified re-leasing, occupying vacant real estate along LA’s Wilshire Boulevard. The defensive patina of plywood sheeting that separated vacant commercial properties from the street was moved back behind their sheet-glass walls, staging a material surface more familiar to eviction or riots as luxuriously printed, undulating drapes of fabric that concealed the space within (Plywood Curtains, 2010).


While in many regards the architecture of commercial sales seems to have progressed very little from deals done behind a velvet curtain—the maintenance of the exclusive arbitration of surplus value demanding that there is always one further door through which access is denied, a convention made more public and awkward by the contemporary proliferation of art fairs—the shift in nomenclature from “private” to “commercial” gallery underlines the exponential demand for landmark galleries and public visibility. This relationship to the public realm is seldom used engagingly, the challenge of vitrinized space often being obviated by covering the windows with vinyl, or the default stud walls. Paul McCarthy’s installation Pig Island (2003–2010), part of the artist’s 2011–12 exhibition at Hauser and Wirth (“The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship,” which occupied the gallery’s two London spaces, in Piccadilly and Savile Row), at least engaged wryly with this context: units of studio detritus on pallets (many on wheels, no less) both evoking a wonderfully decluttered studio back in California and taking the form, on the historically mercantile Savile Row, of an extremely upscale yard sale.


Conversely, apparently taking a lead from Kiesler’s writings on the possibility for a building’s façade operating 24 hours per day, Los Angeles’s Farago gallery has been staging exhibitions to Downtown’s pedestrian shopping traffic day and night since opening in three former jewelry stores on West 8th Street in 2014. Because of the shallowness of the three adjacent glass-fronted shopfronts, works remain visible and well-lit around the clock. During William Crawford’s exhibition “More Worried than a Worm in a Bird’s Nest” in early 2016, the subtle dissonance between the gallery and its surroundings was amplified by the elegant display of pornographic drawings, just legible from the sidewalk.


This visibility and familiarity of context has been exploited to even more democratic ends in artist and curator Noah Davis’s Underground Museum in Arlington Heights. Founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis, in 2012, the gallery occupies a series of connecting storefronts in this working-class area of Los Angeles, and was established with the intention of bringing a “high-end gallery into a place that has no cultural outlets within walking distance.”(10) His now renowned “Imitation of Wealth” exhibition from 2013 refabricated major works by Jeff Koons, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, and other luminaries in what was, in many ways, an entirely conventional exhibition of modern masters had it not been for the unconventional provenance of the works (for example, the vintage Hoover for Imitation of Jeff Koons [2013], a copy of the 1980 work New Hoover Convertible, was sourced for 70 dollars on Craigslist) and its context. The exhibition’s cyclical re-incorporation saw it re-installed in Los Angeles at the MOCA’s own new Storefront for Art project before Davis’s untimely death last year. That this exhibition, through Davis’s negotiation, has established a reciprocal loan relationship between these two institutions is a considerable legacy, though it remains to be seen what identity this new space created by MOCA will be able to forge, disappointingly staged on a gentrified plaza opposite a gift shop and terraced café—though MOCA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth’s intelligent rehang of the museum’s main collection suggests that this context may yet be productively parasitized.


The recognition and re-evaluation implied by this new project, of a now-ubiquitous but often underexploited form, appears to be a positive move in light of its historical legacy. It remains to be seen however if commercial galleries, and indeed artists themselves, have the desire (and time, budget, courage) to engage with and exploit the architectural potentials of an adopted typology with Bolande’s, or Michael Asher’s (for example, June 8 – August 12, 1979, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois) clarity of purpose, nuanced relationship to context, and formal dexterity.






(1) Advances which, in coincidence with the lifting of punitive levies on glass and the repeal of the window tax, would lead to the proliferation of plate-glass “picture windows” in the architecture of commerce in the years that followed.

(2) See Kate Nichols’s excellent essay “Art and Commodity: Sculpture Under Glass at the Crystal Palace” in Sculpture and the Vitrine, John C. Welchman, ed. (Farnham: Ashgate/The Henry Moore Institute, 2013), 23–46.

(3) Giacomo Balla, The Futurist Universe, 1918, cited by Welchman, ibid., in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 219.

(4) “…an image of this kind is not likely to pass unnoticed in a bookstore window,” wrote Magritte in a letter to Breton on his design for Breton’s 1934 pamphlet “What is Surrealism?” in Magritte to Breton, June 22, 1934, in René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2, David Sylvester, ed. (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds and Houston: The Menil Foundation, 1993), 30, quoted by Welchman, ibid. René Magritte established the advertising agency Studio Dongo with his brother Paul in 1930.

(5) A similar combination of pragmatism and opportunity would lead Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (as freelance window dressers through the 1950s), James Rosenquist (1959), and Andy Warhol (1961) to develop window displays for Bonwit Teller in New York, following Salvador Dalí’s controversial commission in 1939.

(6) Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930).

(7) See, for example, the renovation and installation design by Carlo Scarpa for Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo (1954), and by Franco Albini for Palazzo Bianco, Genoa (1951).

(8) “NO MORE WALLS!” Kiesler, ibid, 30.

(9) The original cavaletes de vidro [glass easels] were removed and destroyed in 1996, and re-fabricated and re-installed by MASP artistic director Adriano Pedrosa in December 2015.

(10) Yael Lipschutz, “Links: Q+A with Noah Davis,” Art in America, March 11, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/noah-davis-roberts-tilton/.

ORDOVAS | ARTISTS AND LOVERS

Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato (self-portrait), 1940.

Artists and Lovers November 4, 2016–January 7, 2017 Press view: November 3, 2016, 10am–6pm (RSVP) Ordovas 9 East 77th Street New York, NY 10075 Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6pm T +1 212 756 8870 www.ordovasart.com Artists and Lovers, an exhibition curated by London-based gallerist Pilar Ordovas, presents works by a number of the greatest artistic unions of the mid-20th century to suggest how love and friendship can shape creative process. With Peggy Guggenheim's life of lovers, friends, curators, mentors and artists in mind, Ordovas has brought together works by eleven artistic partnerships for this free, public exhibition held on New York's Upper East Side, from November 4, 2016 through January 7, 2017. Artists and Lovers will feature a major Frida Kahlo self-portrait, painted in 1940, which has not been displayed in the United States for over 30 years (originally commissioned for the New York home of the American engineer Sigmund Firestone) and (Silver Square), painted by Jackson Pollock circa 1950, a work that hung for many years in the New York apartment of fellow Abstract Expressionist and Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner. As well as offering a glimpse into the much bigger tale of the cross-germination of ideas between Europe and America from the 1930s to the mid 1970s, the exhibition also aims to reflect Peggy Guggenheim's blurring of the boundaries between art collection, life and love. "Peggy Guggenheim's powerful vision, and her ability to make no differentiation between art and love, colleagues and friends, sparked the idea to stage this exhibition. I was also fascinated by how the old and new worlds came together during this period of cross-fertilization, and how much smaller the artistic community was then," comments Pilar Ordovas. "The web of friendships and relationships between artists, patrons, friends, collectors, curators and intellectuals was intense; in order to navigate this complex constellation of art and partnerships, we have chosen to look at the period through the work of 11 couples. It has been fascinating to consider these artistic unions, and to explore the lasting power of creative influence." The couples: Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957) Kay Sage (1898–1963) and Yves Tanguy (1900–1955) Leonora Carrington OBE (1917–2011) and Max Ernst (1891–1976) Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) and Max Ernst (1891–1976) Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) and Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) Elaine de Kooning (née Fried), (1918–1989) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Lee Krasner (1908–1984) and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) John Cage (1912–1992), Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), Cy Twombly (1928–2011), Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943–2011) and Donald Judd (1928–1994) About Ordovas  Pilar Ordovas founded her eponymous gallery in 2011 after 13 years at Christie's, where she was a Chairman for Post-War and Contemporary art in Europe, and two years as a Director of Gagosian Gallery, London. Scholarly in tone, the gallery has staged 16 museum-level exhibitions in London and, since 2015, in New York, bringing focus to historical works as well as modern masters, from artists including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Alexander Calder, to Alberto Giacometti, Rembrandt and Auguste Rodin. Many works are loaned from private collections to which there is no public access and several exhibitions have been organized in close collaboration with major European institutions including The Courtauld Gallery, London; and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. In the autumn of 2015, Ordovas began its international exhibition program, with an outpost show in New York, Chillida: Rhythm-Time-Silence (October 30, 2015–January 7, 2016). This was the first major Eduardo Chillida exhibition on U.S. soil in 25 years, and re-introduced the artist's work to a new audience of American art-lovers and collectors. In spring 2016, Ordovas established a permanent base in New York, opening an office in Tribeca. RSVP for press view: Clara Zevi, clara@ordovasart.com / T +1 212 756 8870 / Clare Roberts, clare@ordovasart.com / T +44 7899 065 088 or for media requests.