Daniel Buren
Axer / Désaxer Lavoro in situ, 2015, Madre, Napoli – #2
October 10, 2015–July 4, 2016
Mark Leckey
DESIDERATA (in media res)
October 10, 2015–January 18, 2016
Marco Bagnoli
La Voce. Nel giallo faremo una scala o due al bianco invisibile
October 10, 2015–February 29, 2016
Madre-Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina
Napoli Via Settembrini 79
80139 Naples
Italy
www.madrenapoli.it
Together with Come un gioco da bambini. Lavoro in situ, 2014–2015, Madre, Napoli – #1, which will be open until 29 February 2016, Axer / Désaxer. Lavoro in situ, 2015, Madre, Napoli – #2, curated by Andrea Viliani and Eugenio Viola, is the second of two projects which have been specially commissioned by the Madre museum in 2015 from the French artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938, Boulogne-Villancourt) on the occasion of the first ten years of the Madre’s activity. Buren has conceived both projects as major solo exhibitions articulated through time and space, a real public celebration of the relationship between the museum and its audience, between the institution and its community, as combined elements of the concept of work in situ. Axer / Désaxer consists of an intervention of architectural dimensions, conceived by Buren especially for the atrium at the palazzo Donnaregina: set obliquely facing the street in front, the museum building is made to “rotate” by the artist’s intervention, creating an area of perceptual and cognitive mobility, of vision, mediation, mutual attraction and communion, in which interior and exterior, museum and community penetrate into each other and merge. Through 8.7-cm-thick black and white stripes (one of the recurrent features of the artist’s in situ works), the floor of the entrance suggests an unusual escape route and a potential perspective axis rectilinear to the road axis, so that the museum emerges from itself to embrace the city around it, while a structure-pavilion, consisting of colored surfaces and mirrors, reverberates and enhances this new isometric imagery.
DESIDERATA (in media res), curated by Elena Filipovic and Andrea Viliani and organized under the programme MADREscenza Seasonal School in collaboration with WIELS, Brussels and Haus der Kunst, Munich, is the first retrospective, as well as the first solo exhibition in an Italian public institution, devoted to Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead). Revealing the profound and seminal influence that the British artist has had on subsequent generations of artists, the exhibition presents, along with new productions, a wide selection of historical works realized in each of the media used by Leckey—sculpture, installation, sound works and environments, performances and videos—installed in a unitary course conceived for the spaces of the museum as a progressive series of interiors. Leckey systematically seeks to move beyond the specific, self-referential field of art to move to the boundaries and the meanders of everyday life, exploring the way in which symbols, icons, goods, and contemporary fetishes—both tangible and intangible, sought after and valuable or trivial or vulgar—continually redefine and shape our identity into an inter-subjective, mobile and indefinite entity. From his investigation into the cosmos of musical subcultures in London and British cultural history, to the exploration of digital technology or brands and their impact on our consciousness, Leckey explores the inextricable articulation between high culture and popular culture, physicality and virtuality, individual and collective, copy and original, fear and desire, melancholy and frenzy, that permeates our experience of the world, influenced by a variety of forces that are profoundly contradictory but interconnected. Within the plurality of the works presented, the museum itself becomes an imaginary machine, between gigantic forms of cartoon characters, speaking refrigerators, totemic sculptures composed of stacked speakers, motorway lights, advertising billboards, scintillating grids, leading us hypothetically—in a dance between analogical and digital, northern soul and rave—“in media res.” Accompanying the exhibition is the artist’s first monographic catalogue, produced by the three partner museum institutions and published by Walther König, Cologne.
Since the early 1970s, the artistic practice of Marco Bagnoli (b. 1949, Empoli) has been divided between drawing, painting, sculpture, environmental and sound installation, combining them with each other in a pervasive synthesis of aesthetic datum and scientific statement, theories of vision and color and iconological research, ancient knowledge and a moving experience of space and time in which the work explores the ramifications of thought, becoming a matrix of knowledge, both rational and intuitive. The intervention of Bagnoli at the Madre museum, titled La voce. Nel giallo faremo una scala o due al bianco invisibile, is part of the project L’ALBERO DELLA CUCCAGNA. Nutrimenti dell’arte, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, with the patronage of EXPO Milano 2015 and presented simultaneously on October 10 at the XI Giornata del Contemporaneo AMACI—Associazione dei Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani. A first version of this work by Bagnoli was created by the artist in 1975 in the form of a ladder built into the wall of his studio-home in Milan. Crossing it diagonally, descending and ascending, the work established a linear arc and an ideal bridge reaching from heaven to earth, between physical experience and the metaphysical dimension. In the version presented at the Madre, the work changes shape, growing inside the room located in the second courtyard of the museum until it pierces the roof and expands into the external environment. Resting on a light device, the voice emitted by an ampoule dilates into a sound reverberation that flows into a point outside the room, spreading the description-recitation of the menu of a Neapolitan meal, ordered according to a mathematical and combinatorial order of dishes that then proliferate ceaselessly. Thanks to Seda International Packaging Group.
