Generations of Art: 10 Years at FAR
1 May – 10 July 2005
Opening: 30 April 2005, 18.00
Various sites in Como
Tuesday – Sunday, 16.00 – 19.30
Free entrance
www.fondazioneratti.org
Saturday 30 April 2005 the exhibition Generations of Art – 10 years at FAR opens in Como, celebrating the X anniversary of the Advanced Course in Visual Arts.
The workshop conceived by Annie Ratti, curated in the past editions by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Angela Vettese, was strongly encouraged by Antonio Ratti to open to contemporary art the Foundation, now directed by Mario Fortunato.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali, organized in collaboration with the Comune di Como – Assessorato alla Cultura and supported by the Camera di Commercio di Como. Curator and selector of the exhibition is Giorgio Verzotti, assisted by Anna Daneri.
Since 1995 the Course, closed every year by a collective exhibition of the Visiting Professor and the Students, has featured some of the most important protagonists of the international contemporary art scene. Every year the artists created new site-specific projects for the city of Como and its spaces.
Generations of Art – 10 years at FAR aims to underline the relevance reached by the Course among the numerous initiatives for the promotion of young artists in the international art system.
The exhibition brings together the works of the ten Visiting Professors – Joseph Kosuth (1995), John Armleder (1996), Allan Kaprow (1997), Hamish Fulton (1998), Haim Steinbach (1999), Ilya Kabakov (2000), Marina Abramovic (2001), Giulio Paolini (2002), Richard Nonas (2003), Jimmie Durham (2004) – together with the works of twenty selected students. From Italy: Simone Berti, Gianni Caravaggio, Giuseppe Gabellone, Stefania Galegati, Luisa Lambri, Claudia Losi, Marzia Migliora, Gabriele Picco, Paola Pivi and Pietro Roccasalva. From abroad: Elizabeth Aro (Spain), Mircea Cantor (Romania), Jorn Ebner (Germany/UK), Lisa Lapinski (USA), Polonca Lovsin (Slovenia), Mauricio Lupini (Venezuela), Laura Matei (Romania), Barak Reiser (Israel), Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir (Iceland) and Salla Tykka (Finland).
The exhibition spreads through Como’s historical centre, in various sites.
At the first floor of Fondazione Antonio Ratti there will be Haim Steinbach’s installation Fern, Hudson / Como, Volta. In this work the artist, famous since the ’80s for his object assemblages, brings together photos of instruments used by Volta, old toys and wooden boats from a shop in Hudson.
At the ground floor of the Foundation there will be photos and video installations by Allan Kaprow, inventor of the happening. This section will illustrate some of the most famous actions of the great American artist.
In the garden at the entrance of the Foundation, the visitors will find a work by Richard Nonas, the American artist-anthropologist ,and a work by Jimmie Durham, the Cherokee 2004 Visiting Professor. On one side Nonas’ minimalist series of porphyry curbs, on the other Durham’s Stones Rejected by the Builder, the ironic and anti-functional tube that “connects” the lawn to the building.
The Broletto will host the great installation L’opera autentica by Giulio Paolini, leading artist of Arte Povera. The work consists of a cubic white space containing four canvases with artist’s drawings of the four possible positions of the Plexiglas shape hanging at the centre of the white cube.
In the same space the Swiss artist John Armleder, European member of the Fluxus movement, will revise the work he created at Villa Carlotta through which he analyzed the overlapping of internal and external spaces with an impressive structure made of scaffoldings and stroboscopic lights. There will also be a film selection.
The association Borgovico 33 will screen two videos of the body-artist Marina Abramovic. The videos belong to the Energy Clothes series illustrating the clothes-sculptures created in Como.
This space will also feature the photographic series entitled Essay by Joseph Kosuth, father of conceptual art. This work presents the installation created in Como in 1995: a room of the Fondazione Ratti, completely painted in black containing fragments of letters by Pliny the Younger describing the natural and architectural beauties of the Lake Como, together with sections from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and parts of a text on the etiquette of XIX century English aristocracy.
Hamish Fulton, the British walking artist, will present one of his works inspired to his experience as Visiting Professor in 1998 in Como.
Outside the former Church of San Francesco, the Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov will install once again The Fountain – Mother and Son, a big iron skeleton of a bottle with a spring of water flowing from it.
In San Francesco there will also be the exhibition of the 20 former students with either works created during their workshop or new projects conceived specifically for this occasion.
The catalogue, published by Charta, will include texts by Annie Ratti (President of the Foundation), by the curator Giorgio Verzotti (chief-curator at Mart in Rovereto and member of FAR’s scientific committee), Anna Daneri (coordinator of the Advanced Course in Visual Arts since 1995), Angela Vettese and Giacinto di Pietrantonio (first curators since 1995), and by the ten Visiting Professors.
Catalogue: Charta – available during the exhibition
Info: Fondazione Antonio Ratti, t 0039 031 233211 email: info@fondazioneratti.org
Press office: Ilaria Gianoli, mob. 0039 333 6317344 email: ufficiostampa@fondazioneratti.org
