Collection

PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG

Untitled, 2010

Pratchaya Phinthong is a Thai artist working with the processes typical of conceptual art, investigating socio-economic dynamics within communities and production chains. In this piece, the mark of the company producing the Renaissance canvas has been hand-painted, and the canvas has then been covered in a nylon film, to camouflage the craftsmanship in the production of an image that is otherwise industrially printed. With this gesture, the artist questions the concepts of seriality and uniqueness, of original and copy, of project and residual object. The work is part of a group of canvases of different sizes and dates, in which the serial reproduction of the same pattern is actually realised through the uniqueness of the pictorial gesture.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS

La Soupe de Daguerre, 1975

Ed. of 60

The work consists of a series of small photographs depicting ingredients for the preparation of a soup named after the inventor of the first photographs called daguerreotypes: Monsieur Daguerre. As in many of his works, here too Broodthaers combines iconographic elements with linguistic definitions, ironically disrupting their logical correspondence. The soup in question is the result of combining a series of elements reproduced in photographs, just as photography is the result of combining a series of elements and chemical processes. The taxonomic presentation of the ingredients is functional to the supposed scientific nature of the game of representation, and of the methods of photographic reproduction.

DENNIS OPPENHEIM

Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970

Ed. of 30

In this work, the artist depicts the effect of prolonged exposure to the sun’s rays on his own body through a photographic sequence. He is partly covered by an open book, so as to leave the tan line visible on the shaded skin. The book in question is about military tactics and the work was created during the years of the Vietnam conflict. The artist thus refers to the damage that war causes on human bodies, as the infamous photograph Napalm girl from 1972 shows in an unequivocal and frightening way, becoming an iconic image of this sad chapter in history. A performative approach is combined with a dry and documentary formalisation, and a sterile language, in which every piece of information listed in the caption is reported as a scientific fact.

WALLACE BERMAN

Untitled (TV), 1964

Wallace Berman, actively involved in the Californian Beat Generation, began producing his collages with a Kodak Verifax machine in the early 1960s. These works were obtained with a reproduction technique that predates photocopies and is characterised by sepia tones, on which the artist experimented with tones and textures over the years. The iconic image of his production is a small transistor radio into which he inserted elements from books, newspapers and magazines. This work is one of only two made with the reproduction of a television set – instead of the radio – inside which is inserted the image of a female nude, on which is the magic square of the Sator, an ancient Latin palindrome inscription, the meaning of which remains uncertain to this day.

CAROL RAMA

Luogo e segni, 1975

Carol Rama’s work is an assemblage of elements placed on a car hood, stretched over a frame just like a canvas. The inner tube tyres, a memory of her father’s car body, which also produced a particular model of bicycle, are glued like patches onto the similarly industrial support. Recovered and ‘memory’ objects populate the iconographic universe of the artist, who experienced her art as a form of redemption, almost a cure, from neuroses and obsessions that participated in the creation of a personal mythology. This work was the last large canvas to leave Rama’s home before her death, and can be seen reproduced in numerous photographs of the home studio, now listed by the Superintendency as a historical-artistic heritage of the city of Turin.

ROBERT BARRY

Untitled, 1967

Robert Barry was born in 1936 in New York. He currently lives and works in New Jersey. Along with Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Douglas Huebler, Barry belongs to the first generation of conceptual artists. From the mid-1960s, he probed the limits of materiality and visibility, questioning its presence in time and space. Reflecting on the dematerialization of the artwork as an object, Barry famously had the three galleries that were meant to host exhibitions of his work in 1969 announce their closure.

In the former part of his career, he almost only relied on non-material supports like ultrasound, magnetism and telepathy while at later stages he resorted to more traditional techniques, including painting and photography. Well known are his installations centred around the written word for which Barry printed capital letters directly onto walls and other surfaces to intimate a narrative and inspire contemplation.

After graduating in Art from Hunter College in New York in 1963, Barry began his career as a painter. Like most artists of his generation, he rejected the monumentality typically associated with Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, as well as the traditional framing of the artwork as an object. Moving from these premises, Barry set out to take and tear painting apart. From the year 1967, he started producing scattered and fragmentary monochrome wall paintings that responded to the space wherein they were placed rather than acquiring meaning based on the content they framed. “It just dawned on me that the space around the painting was interesting”, said the artist.

From that moment on, Barry has investigated the relationships between surface, space and volume; positive and negative forms; presence and absence; the void and the viewer. This, with the aim to reduce the physical encumbrance of the art object to a minimum. In the work shown here, the artist purposely left the canvas raw and exposed. The two light ochre stripes around the outer vertical edges of the painting bridge between the work and its surroundings. The painting thus leaks out of the physical boundaries of the canvas and the frame, and leaps into the realm of the viewer.

ROBERT BARRY

Beyond, Instead, Possible…, 2012

The Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation is home to the site-specific installation “Beyond, Instead, Possible…” by the American artist Robert Barry. The work was made for the library windows in 2012, following two visits to the museum by the artist and his agent, Massimo Minini, while it was still being built.

Robert Barry is considered to be one of the founders of American conceptual art. The artist uses a vocabulary of about 200 words to create installations on walls, canvases, windows, projections or sculptures. The selection of the words is made on the basis of the specific location, context or situation the work has been created for.

The “Beyond, Instead, Possible…” installation is the result of a direct discussion between Antonio Dalle Nogare and Robert Barry and is markedly affected by the natural environment that surrounds the building. Light and nature alter the work hour by hour, so it appears to be continually evolving.

DAN GRAHAM

Bolzano Pavilion, 2016

One of the main exhibits in the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation house-museum is the site-specific installation by the American artist Dan Graham. The work is a pavilion built of reflective glass and stainless steel and is now located in the garden of the Foundation. Due to its reflective sides, it changes continuously according to the light, weather conditions and the position of the visitor.  The work’s close contact with its natural surroundings and architectural setting, all help to make the “Pavilion” experience even more meaningful.

Dan Graham has been analysing the relationships between architectural environments and their inhabitants for over fifty years with diversified conceptual art practices that include installations, performances, videos, photographs and books. Starting in the 1970s he has focused on building architectural pavilions from transparent or mirrored glass that he has installed all over the world and now feature in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Dia Art Foundation (New York) and many other institutions too.

HEIMO ZOBERNIG

Untitled, 1988

Heimo Zobernig includes painting, architecture, sculpture and design in his artistic practice, and conceives his exhibition projects as a unicum, in which his publications, conceived as artistic devices, also have a role. It is a matter of considering painting as part of the environment, sculpture as an element of painting, and painting as a participation in the architecture, in a continuous mixture and combination of these various languages, which always starts from the object, sign, and color. In painting, Zobernig has tried to find a personal synthesis between postmodernism, abstractionism and constructivism, through a study of color theories and experiments related to materials. In this case, to deal with the theme of monochrome Zobernig uses a cheap, common medium such as cardboard, and an industrial paint such as synthetic resin. The visual effect is a painting in which texture, color, and brightness are determined by the peculiarities of the materials involved. The result is a painting that is also an object, a painting that is a material, an ordinary, extraordinary everyday thing.

MICHAEL KREBBER

Untitled, 1994

Michael Krebber (Cologne, 1954) is considered a reference by many artists of later generations than his own, thanks to his constant research aimed at questioning the conventions and boundaries of the pictorial medium, understood by the artist as a space for dialogue and a zone of contamination, rather than a process aimed at the production of a painting.

Growing up in Cologne, where the painting practice of Baselitz, Polke and Lupertz was imbued with sacred traits, Krebber felt the need to find his own expressive cipher that would bring painting back into the realm of contingency, of ordinariness, to the point of assuming an almost amateurish character. “I’ve never really had any method except not having a method, which looks like a method,” in this statement can be grasped the desire to practice painting (“with lower case p”) through the use of the most diverse and common materials, completely unrelated to the transmission of content. Krebber approaches the practice of painting without taking himself too seriously – an ironic Duchampian lesson – and yet finding in this “detachment” an internal legitimacy within the discourse of art, the discourse that art has been performing around itself for several decades and which we commonly refer to as conceptual art.

Painting is understood by the artist almost as a performance that manifests itself as a “system of hesitations in which opposing forces simultaneously encourage and hinder each other.”

Krebber’s unfinished aesthetic, however, is not the result of an attempt to sabotage the medium, but rather of a precise desire to extend the discourse beyond the canvas and the space traditionally attributed to painting.

About Antonio Dalle Nogare