Marco Giovani, Niklas Goldbach,
and Yves Netzhammer
Curated by Julia Draganovic and Elena Forin
19 January 2012–3 March 2012
Opening:
19 January 2012, 6–9 p.m.
Galleria Bianconi
Via Lecco 20, Milan
info [at] galleriabianconi.com
Click or Clash? Strategies of Collaboration, a long-term project curated by Julia Draganovic and LaRete Art Projects, promoted by Galleria Bianconi (Via Lecco 20, Milan), deals with the question in which way agreement or disagreement, consent or conflict can create opportunities within the sphere of working together. Since the first event, in October 2011, Galleria Bianconi and LaRete Art Projects are inviting three artists to take part in each stage, in order to create a visual dialogue that is accompanied by panel discussions and publications. The aim of the gallery and curatorial team is to disclose a thorough debate about current issues not only of the art world.
Adopting the strategy of a joint venture, brought about also through individual differences with Marco Giovani, Niklas Goldbach and Yves Netzhammer as protagonists, Click of Clash? Strategies of collaboration this time focuses on power structures in society: the single individual and its relationships, space and technology, and the role of the image will be at the core of this second debate about collaboration. Meanwhile the artists each decided to unfold their own statement about the above issues in order to create a series of juxtapositions. The curatorial team of Julia Draganovic and Elena Forin develops a new practice of collaboration.
Marco Giovani is creating a series of photographic and installation works in which man seems to return as a mere form and at the same time as a catalyst in a close-knit network of interactions. With their lighter and darker sides, the images and objects created by Giovani reveal codes that govern perception, developing the concepts of the individual, nature and artifacts, and thus offering a sense of dubious potential and ambiguous rules. The great impact and sophistication of his works is always poised between perceptive deception and powerful presence.
Giovani’s work measures up well against the humanoids created by Yves Netzhammer, which, with their reference to the simplification of the digital world, create emblematic relationships between each other and with environment, nature and landscape. Netzhammer projects the depths of a submerged universe in which the conditions and episodes of the being of man in the world come about. He studies their nature, portraying the individual as a power structure in relation to social mechanisms such as violence and reciprocity. His video is linked to an installation of silhouettes of objects and paintings that are seen as icons of our existence, as individuals and in a community.
The latent ambiguity and opulence of this relationship creates an intriguing dialogue both with Giovani and with Niklas Goldbach. Through video and photography, Goldbach’s work potentially multiplies the identity of the individual in a standardized form to infinity, revealing socio-political aspects in the most diverse contexts. In Milan, Goldbach will present Bel Air, a video that takes us on an inner journey, but also on a real trip by car through the deserted landscape of the Everglades near Miami, in which Christoph Bach, Best Actor in Germany in 2010, plays the part of four different characters who display the wide range or roles and power games that take place in human behaviour.
Marco Giovani was born in Modena in 1964. He started exhibiting in Reggio Emilia in 1997 for the exhibition Silenzio, sei meditazioni oltre il rumore, with a conceptual work about the elusiveness of identity and of reality, that foreshadows the great change that would have led us to the web. The following year he started producing overlapped shadows of bodies and objects by using graphite powders covered in plastic films, with a misleading photographic effect. By overturning the use of the photographic means, the cycle Alien begins in 2006. Among the most recent exhibitions: Se un giorno d’inverno un viaggiatore, Museo Archeologico (Bologna 2011); The simulacrum of reality, Biennale di Videofotografia (Alessandria, 2011); Eroi! Come noi?, P.A.N. (Napoli, 2007); Anteprima, La Quadriennale di Roma (Torino, 2004); Coniugazioni, Castello di Ettersburg (Weimar, 2003).
Niklas Goldbach, born in Witten, Germany, lives and works in Berlin. After studying sociology at the University Bielefeld and photography/video at the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld, Goldbach graduated with honors in the media arts program of the University of the Arts Berlin. In 2005 he received the Fulbright Grant New York (2005–2006) and majored in the MFA program of Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2006 he was awarded with a “Meisterschüler” degree at the University of the Arts Berlin. He presented his works in numerous group exhibitions, solo shows & festivals in venues like 54. International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Reina Sofia National Museum Madrid, Mori-Art Museum Tokyo, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and received several sholarships and awards.
Yves Netzhammer, born in 1970, studied Visual Design at the Zurich College of Art and Design. Since 1997, he has been working on a widely ramified, poetic imagery cosmos. His video installations, objects, slide shows and drawings fascinate through their bodily charisma and their formal clarity. The playful recombination of elements which seemingly can not be combined leads to the threshold of our existence’s dark side: dulcet aspects interlock with displeasing ones, the dead melts with the alive into creatures never seen before, and the depicted scenarios run from microscopic to giant scales. Solo exhibitions include Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai (2011), Kunstmuseum Bern (2010), Palazzo Strozzi (2009), SFMOMA, San Francisco (2008), Venice Biennale (2007), Karlskirche Kassel (supporting program documenta 12, 2007), Museum Rietberg, Zürich (2006), Kunsthalle Bremen (2005) and Helmhaus Zürich (2003). Group exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2010), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2007), Witte de With and TENT, Rotterdam (2006), Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2006) and National Gallery Prague (2005). Yves Netzhammer lives and works in Zurich.
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