Gianfranco Baruchello: Cold Cinema
Films, Videos and Works 1960–1999
John Latham: Great Noit
Works 1955–1998
10 December 2014–22 February 2015
La Triennale di Milano
Viale Alemagna 6
20121 Milan
Italy
T +39 02 724341
The solo exhibitions of works by Gianfranco Baruchello and John Latham—both curated by Alessandro Rabottini—are two projects without precedent for the Italian public: if Latham’s show is the first anthological exhibition ever put on by an Italian public institution, Baruchello’s is the largest retrospective ever devoted to the artist’s films and videos, realized in collaboration with the MADRE-Musum of Contemporary Art Donnaregina in Naples, which has been working since 2013 on a series of presentations of Baruchello’s cinematographic work as part of its permanent collection. Under the artistic directorship of Edoardo Bonaspetti, Curator of Visual Arts and New Media at the Triennale, both shows examine the artists’ works, highlighting their formal and conceptual similarities and differences. Both influential artists who remained outside of the established movements, Latham and Baruchello created a bridge between visual art and literature, and between the materials of art and philosophical investigations. They both brought about a critical analysis of the cognitive systems of reality, ranging from religion to philosophy, through to literature and science. They did so by means of artistic practices that encompassed painting, assemblage, film, installation and performance.
Gianfranco Baruchello: Cold Cinema. Films, Videos and Works 1960–1999 brings together, for the first time and in a systematic way, a broad selection of experimental films and videos that the artist started producing in the early 1960s.
Gianfranco Baruchello’s artistic practice is one of the most singular and complex in the Italian art scene since the Second World War. Since the 1950s, the artist has been exploring painting, installations, assemblages, film, photography, writing and sound, expanding his visual research far beyond the traditional areas of art by introducing the practices of agriculture, anthropology and economics into the language of art, as forms of a critical analysis of our consumer society.
The exhibition includes 16 film and video works all made between 1963 and 1999, showing Baruchello’s experimental approach to the languages of cinema, documentaries and cinematic texts. In the form of a chronological and thematic journey, the exhibition explores the principal themes that run through this particular area of Baruchello’s art, linking film to the other media that the artist has always adopted, such as painting, drawing, novels and sculpture.
John Latham: Great Noit. Works 1955–1998 includes over 40 works, which are among the most emblematic of Latham’s entire career. The display is both chronological and grouped by theme, thus illustrating the key aspects of Latham’s artistic research: his reflection on time, the exploration of materials and artistic media, the transformative nature of painting and sculpture, and the investigation on the possibility that reality can be represented within a single all-embracing system, be it scientific, philosophical or political.
A tireless experimenter, Latham went through decades without being part of any artistic current but exerting a profound influence on the generations that came after him. The uniqueness and visionary nature of his work—which combined theoretical reflections with experimentation of visual languages and materials—make him an artist who eludes any simple pigeonholing. The exhibition showcases many of his most iconic works, from the radical invention of the Book Reliefs to the Spray-gun Paintings that he made in the ’60s, through his exploration of moving images to the Glass Works from the ’80s. Latham explored painting, sculpture, assemblage, performance, film and installation, testing the formal and conceptual limits of each medium.
Latham’s work is a provocative and poetic reflection on the nature of human knowledge and on art as a form of intuition that is capable of crossing the boundaries between disciplines.
Gianfranco Baruchello. Cold Cinema. Films, Videos and Works 1960–1999 is organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Baruchello, Rome and MADRE – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples.
Thanks to Massimo De Carlo, Milan–London.
John Latham: Great Noit. Works 1955–1998 is organized in collaboration with the John Latham Foundation, London.
Thanks to Lisson Gallery.
La Triennale di Milano press office
T +39 02 72434 247 / press [at] triennale.org
