BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI | LONDON GALLERY

Isabella Brancolini (left) and Camilla Grimaldi in their new London gallery, with Massimo 

Vitali’s ‘Krka Waterfall Pink’

“London, for us, is an expansion,” says Camilla Grimaldi, a young Italian art dealer, as she 

sits opposite me at Browns in Mayfair, a couple of minutes’ walk from the gallery space she 

and her business partner Isabella Brancolini will open on Friday. 

Brancolini studies me intently as Grimaldi talks; stylish in a beige shift dress and white fishnet 

tights, everything about Brancolini is deliberate yet nothing is forced.

Things are moving fast for the pair, though neither is showing signs of weariness 

(Grimaldi’s blouse, slightly creased, is the only clue that she has just flown in from Rome). 

But they must be used to change. Within four years of finishing university, Grimaldi had 

worked for the contemporary art department of Christie’s in New York, won a scholarship 

to the Venice Guggenheim, risen through the ranks at London’s White Cube gallery and 

assisted the Milanese dealer Claudia Gian Ferrari.

Brancolini’s CV is similarly impressive. She opened her first gallery, Arte e Personae, 

in Florence in 1997, and her second in 2002, showing photography and contemporary art. 

In 2004 she met Grimaldi through an art dealer friend in Milan, and the duo set up the 

Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea in Florence, opening a second branch in 

Rome the following year. London is their latest move.

But why London? “This space is a great window for our collection. 

And photography is growing in London,” says Grimaldi.

Many would say the photography scene in London lags behind that in, say, Paris. 

The British capital has no equivalent of Paris Photo, the world’s most important 

photography fair, and no national museum for photographs. And some would 

argue that even those commercial galleries dedicated to the medium tend to 

show safe rather than cutting-edge work – classics such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, 

for instance.

“In New York, there are hundreds of photography galleries and in Paris there are 

around 50, but here in London there are not that many,” admits Brancolini. 

“It is a very, very young market.”

“But there are strong public institutions here that deal a lot with photography,” 

adds Grimaldi (they have a nifty way of between them covering all angles). 

“Just think of Tate Modern, with the curator of photography.”

That position is fairly recent, I point out. (Simon Baker, Tate Modern’s first curator 

of photography, was appointed in late 2009.) “It’s very recent, yes, but it has happened. 

We hope we are here at the right moment. It’s now that we want to expand; it’s the right 

moment for us too.”

They tell me their London gallery will become their main space, and they’ll spend most 

of their time here. “In Rome,” says Grimaldi, “there is the new MAXXI museum, new 

galleries are opening, and there is change, but,” she pauses, and a pained look falls 

across her face, “the government doesn’t support it. There are very important private 

collectors – in Torino, in Milano – the private scene is active, but in the museums there 

is still a lot to do.” She lets out a sigh.

Do they have a vision for their new gallery? “We’re not dealing with vintage photography, 

we’re not dealing with fashion photography – so we have a very specific direction,” Brancolini 

gently corrects my initial choice of word. “We are using the medium of photography in 

different ways. We feel there is space for that in London. For many years photography 

has been fine art or photojournalism but photography is more than that. Photography 

can be video and it can be installation; it’s integrated in contemporary art.”

Their inaugural exhibition – still to be installed when I visited the gallery, a light-filled, 

first floor space on Albemarle Street – will present the work of contemporary French 

photographer Marie Amar alongside sculptures by the Italian arte povera artist Pino Pascali, 

who died in 1968 aged just 32.

Amar’s “La Poussière” is a series of pictures taken of dust sculptures made out of thin 

layers of lint from the insides of washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Brancolini and 

Grimaldi have decided to display the sculptures themselves “like the real maquettes” 

alongside Amar’s photographs – not just to show the process but “because they are the 

work itself”.

“If you are far away you can’t understand what’s going on,” says Grimaldi of “La Poussière”. 

“What is it? It looks like an abstract painting, an Abstract Expressionist, almost like a Rothko. 

Then when you get near to it you can see a hair, a piece of dust, a piece of cotton.”

Beside Amar’s work are three of Pascali’s 1966-68 “Bachi da Setola” sculptures, made of 

colourful, tightly coiled lengths of acrylic brush. The name means literally “bristle worms”, 

a play on seta, the Italian for silk. Pascali often worked with the materials newly available 

in Italy’s industrial boom of the 1960s; Amar, 50 years later, deals in their by-products, theirù

waste. “That’s the dialogue,” explains Brancolini, “it’s all about materia.”

With such emphasis on the sculptural potential of photographs, I ask whether they think of 

their gallery as a photography gallery at all. “Not in the way photography has traditionally been 

seen,” Brancolini answers, choosing her words carefully, “not just a frame on the wall.” She cites 

the gallery’s second exhibition, scheduled to open late in May, which will show the work of British 

artist Clare Strand, including “Ten Least Most Wanted”, a series of snapshots taken from her 

scrapbooks, each set in between two pieces of glass and displayed together in a cabinet. “We will 

sell the whole thing. Photography can become sculpture,” Brancolini insists.

They are keen to be seen as daring in their choices as art dealers. “It’s about being courageous, 

about showing something which is difficult to sell. Some of the work we show is not easy,” says 

Brancolini before conceding: “Our London space will be for new and established artists – but the 

‘new’, well, in some ways they are not that new.” The Italian photographer Massimo Vitali, whose 

work the gallery will show later in the year, has a print of “Nice, Negresco” (2005) for auction at 

Phillips de Pury in New York on April 9, estimated at an impressive $35,000-$45,000.

Do you ever disagree? I ask, searching their expressions for a telling flicker of animosity. “No!” 

they laugh. “I know it seems very strange,” admits Grimaldi, “I’m trying to think but … no!” 

She cannot recall an argument. “We try to plan, we discuss and we look at a lot of pieces together. 

There is a lot of sharing, and an understanding of why we are going in a certain direction. 

It’s very open.”

If they haven’t had it yet, I think it unlikely they will have their first fight in my presence.

‘Marie Amar Pino Pascali’, Brancolini Grimaldi, London, from April 8 to May 21

brancolinigrimaldi

Filed under: Google News London from Google News London
Article source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/119a72f6-5be4-11e0-bb56-00144feab49a.html

london-on.info

ANIMAL ARCHITECTURE

ùmicroorganisms—each one with unique ways of world-making." [Images: The "Bee Station" by Jamie Hutchison]. Animal Architecture thus "invites your critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can  to illustrate cospecies coshaping." [Images: The "Bat Billboard" by Chris Woebken and Natalie Jeremijenko]. Designing either with or for nonhuman species can offer, LaRocca and Dodington suggest, "a greater understanding  or the "Animal Estates" project by Fritz Haeg. [Images: From "Animal Estates" by Fritz Haeg]. On the other hand, of course, there is another, equally fascinating strategy of spatial inhabitation—available  supercontinent described by German meteorologist and astronomer Alfred Wegener."  [Images: From a design for a zoo in St. Petersburg, Russia, by TN Plus]. Accordingly, the project is a kind of virtual reconstruction of that now-absent supercontinent: The main idea of the project for the new Saint Petersburg zoo is to reunite in one place pieces of lands which are  separated today, but which were once in connection.The project takes symbolic core samples all over the world  from various biotopes to assemble them in the Saint Petersburg zoo in the form of an archipelago. Every island  of the project must be considered as a sampleof a particular zone of a continent. TN Plus thus hope for the resulting archipelagic complex—which will include its own microclimates and  cultural and scientific life in Saint Petersburg." [Image: An archipelagic zoological park in St. Petersburg by TN Plus]. What fascinates me here is the prospect that cross-species interaction can take on a particular spatial form—or series  communication be most effectively fostered by spatial design, and, again, how do we then measure a particular landscape's  tactical success?  [Images: A future zoo in St. Petersburg by TN Plus]. As I wrote here several years ago, also in reference to a zoological park by TN Plus, it would seem that zoos can  which humans attempt to communicate with other species.  It's as if there is a spatial grammar of zoological communication, and it takes shape, here, as landscape architecture. Zoos, in this way of thinking, can be at least partially subject to rhetorical analysis: do they express what they are  intended to communicate, how has this meaning been produced, and how do we measure the success of its reception? Further, what are the risks of miscommunication? In any case, there are so many directions to go with this discussion of "animal architecture"—theoretical,  Animal Architecture, founded in 2009 by Jonathan LaRocca and Ned Dodington, is currently on the hunt for "exciting  projects that engage the lives, minds and behaviors of our alternate, sometimes familiar companion species—insects,  birds, mammals, fish and mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other—or as we say it here:  of biotic and ecological relationships [that] can influence design, reshape our cities, and restructure our homes —benefiting the human and  non-human animals that interact with and around them." For instance, "what making friends with a duck can teach  us about urban design." Such projects can occur across multiple spatial and temporal scales, whether at the level of landscape infrastructure,  through such things as wildlife corridors, national parks, and even zoos (for instance, the forthcoming project by TN Plus,  described later on in this post), or through much more intimate interventions, such as Jamie Hutchison's "Bee Station"  to humans and nonhumans alike—and that is isinfestation.  From suburban homes taken over by honeybees and wildcats, to the labyrinthine stratigraphies of rats that  colonize our cities from below, nonhuman species have their own ways of using—sometimes wildly repurposing— architecture.  Seen in this light, the spatial strategies of the pest-control industry are as much a question of "animal architecture"  as the design of underground ant cities ortermite mounds. This final project, below, is, at first glance, a more traditional type of "animal architecture. " This is a recent design by Paris-based landscape architects TN Plus for a zoo in St. Petersburg, Russia.  "Our fabricated urban development," the designers write, "will evoke Pangaea, the  "biozones"—to be "an intriguing, mysterious, attractive, off-kilter strategy at the service of the animals and their well-being,  to become the icon of new  of spatial forms—turning landscape architecture into a kind of biological speech act.  In other words, the ideal zoo could be seen as a kind of landscape cryptography: an immersive, trans-species  conversation in which the terrestrial forms, plantlife, and climatological special effects are actually signs, intended  for a nonhuman audience,  simulating—i.e. actively referring to—otherwise locally absent environments.  The "zoo" thus presents a kind of spatial conversation "between man and animal," as the designers describe it. The question, then, is how we can appropriately evaluate the success of such a project. What can be realistically  achieved during the resulting encounters "between man and animal," how can these moments of inter-species  be thought of as a kind of spatial hieroglyphics: an elaborate system of reenactments and signs through  practical, speculative, critical, and otherwise—that I can't wait to see what sort of things are submitted to the  Animal Architectureproject. Register by 15 May 2011 to submit your own essays and designs. Further information—including the names of the editorial jury, which features Sanford Kwinter, Joyce Hwang,  Neeraj Bhatia from InfraNet Lab, myself, and many others—can be found on the Animal Architecture website. bldgblog.blogspot.com/

STEPHAN TILLMANS

Stephan Tillmans

Work from “Luminant Point Arrays (leuchtpunktordnungen)“.

“The Luminant Point Arrays show tube televisions in the moment they are swithed off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture discribes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.”

via today and tomorrow.

THE NATURE OF CHANGE | HIBRIDITY AND MUTATION

Before we go any further there is a confession I should make – I have a slight obsession with art that is visceral, uncomfortable and generally disturbing. Something my friend David – a mutual adorer – once designated ‘the creep factor.’ So when I first laid eyes on images from HRL Contemporary’s upcoming show The Nature of Change: Hybridity and Mutation I was hoping to find something to satisfy my grotesque sensibilities.

Kayde Anobile, Portrait of a Creature, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist and HRL Contemporary.

Hybridity and mutation are taken as a starting point here and spun out through materials, processes and subject matter. Applaudingly, this is not a shock value show of cyborgs and monsters, but is rather polished and leans more towards the unexpected and the uncanny. The ‘creeperies’ found here have a poetic and sensitively commentative approach.

In Kayde Anobile’s installation, Portrait of a Creature, two life sizes yetis face a mirror affixed to the wall, and as you take your place in between them, three faces stare back. These creatures are not monstrous, but rather quite human-like. They stare into the mirror in a state of existential contemplation, their images reflected back to us just the same as ours are.

David A Smith, Banshee, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist and HRL Contemporary.

London-based sculptor David A Smith creates organic hybrid sculptures made of glaringly inorganic materials. Fusing skeletal forms with seductive materials, Smith’s enticingly slick animals vomit up their phosphorescent insides, as in ‘Banshee’ – an excavated prehistoric form constructed of conspicuous synthetic products.

Jan Manski, Onania - The Onaniser Strain, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artist and HRL Contemporary.

Throughout the exhibition hybridity is found in both form and subject matter, however the most striking work is that which tears into the blatant consumerism of contemporary society.

Jan Manski’s work in its wholly complex and all-encompassing narrative approaches that of Matthew Barney, without the self-mythologising and machoism. Manski’s work takes on the guise of a slick advertising campaign for the ultimate self-gratifying consumer item – the Onania.

Jan Manski, Onania - Aetiology Unknown 27, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artist and HRL Contemporary.

A hybrid masturbatory device combining organic and inorganic substrates, the Onania is billed as ‘the ultimate modern plaything.’ As the video advertisement shows, this sickly pink device promises to tap into neural networks, creating a cyclical escalation of ultimate pleasure.

Forcing the user into an isolated and narcissistic existence is not the only concern – as the photographs show, the Onania has horribly disfiguring side-effects, as insides force themselves out, creating bony bulbous growths on the sites of attachment. A self-inflicted mutation brought on by the desire for self-sufficient satisfaction.

As Manski shows us, for the ultimate in pleasure there is a price to be paid – and it is quite horrific.

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