From 23rd March to 15th May 2011 GAMeC hosts the first solo show to be held at an Italian museum of Matteo Rubbi, one of the most singular voices from the new generation of Italian artists, who was proclaimed Winner of the eighth Furla Prize 2011.
The show is part of the Eldorado exhibition series that GAMeC has dedicated to the most interesting emerging artists on the international scene, who are invited to create an original project for the museum’s spaces.
For this occasion Matteo Rubbi has designed an exhibition consisting of a series of interventions that involve the local context from a human and social viewpoint as well as from an historical one. Some of the works are new, while others are the continuation and the development on a larger scale of works that the artist has previously presented.
Many of Rubbi’s works instead take on the appearance of collective and open processes rather than finished objects. Consequently, he often asks other artists, writers and friends to collaborate on works and in situations that, by their very nature, open up to the fortuitous and unexpected, to spontaneous participation and improvisation. On some levels, this aspect of his work evokes the art of Alighiero Boetti, at the centre of which we find the dispersion of individual identity in multiple forms of reality and in collaboration as a creative process. At the same time, however, the idea of sharing as a daily practice ultimately constitutes an enormously topical reflection on the transformations that the Internet is engendering in forms of social interaction, the dynamics of information and the very concept of identity.
Rubbi often uses episodes and memories of Italy’s social, political and cultural history, reactivating events and situations that are connected with the past, but that actually comment on our present. At the centre of his work we often find the dimension of memory and certain atmospheres tied to childhood and adolescence, which then become the inspiration for a national archaeology that randomly employs a variety of materials such as sports, literature, the news, history, opera, political geography and so on.
‘Bounty nello spazio’ is an exhibition of four works, bound to one another by the theme of knowledge seen as a form of exploration, and learning as a form of imagination and discovery. Furthermore, three of these works are deeply connected to the city of Bergamo and to its surroundings, and their realization has been made possible thanks to the collaboration with the daily newspaper ‘L’Eco di Bergamo,’ a number of elementary schools of the city, and with A.B.F. – Azienda Bergamasca Formazione C.F.P. di Bergamo e di Curno.
The show is introduced by a great spatial intervention leading the viewer into the exhibition room: a huge cover made with fabric remnants is the outcome of a process that mingled abstraction and handicraft. The brightness and the size of the stars shining in the skies of Bergamo, in a spring evening of year 3000 and seen from a local vantage point, have been rendered with the colors and the specific brightness and airiness of each fabric, thus creating a night landscape that is both tactile and all-embracing.
Most of the exhibition space that hosts the show is painted with a special black paint turning the walls into writable blackboards.The artist invited artists, friends, scholars form the Physics department of the Università degli Studi di Milano, and children from Bergamo elementary schools, to draw on this enormous surface with colored chalks, trying to imagine what the subatomic world might look like, elaborating quantum mechanics and the superstring theory. This large collective and instable fresco is, however, an attempt to represent something that we will never be able to know on a visual level: in this case knowledge takes on the traits of creative approximation and imaginative elaboration, while the different possibilities to “invent” – each corresponding to a life phase and to the different levels of education and of more or less professional knowledge – all overlap in a choral intervention.
The concept of learning as a form of approximation, whose validity resides in the process rather than in the final outcome, is at the centre of the third intervention of the exhibition, that is the transformation of the exhibition space into a carpenter workshop set up in collaboration with A.B.F. – Azienda Bergamasca Formazione C.F.P. di Bergamo e di Curno.
The show is part of a series honoring Arturo Toffetti
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini