Gianni Pettena, invited within the cycle “Matters of Concern/Matières à penser”, for his first exhibition in Belgium, proposes a project in two parts. 

At La Verrière a selection of objects, models, photos, drawings. documents, videos, installations shows in all evidence the generous and hybrid activity of the artist and this allows to understand his far-reaching attitude, at the same time idealistic and playful, open also to humour and subversion, as well as to a rigorous analytical thinking..

Just a few meters from La Verrière a big installation is built in the space of the ISELP (Institut Supérieur pour l'Étude du Langage Plastique).  

This work, Paper/Midwestern Ocean, fills the exhibition space with white paper stripes which must be cut with scissors to create paths and find one’s space.  

First conceived in 1971 as a collective experiment for a lecture at an American university, this ‘penetrable’ installation proposes an overturning of the architectural experience because it makes invisible the inside of the building before getting it back by means of an anonimous use, independent from the ideas of others.

(Guillame Désanges)

The title of the exhibition "L’usage des richesses" (The Use of Wealth), comes from Georges Bataille, whose ideas on this topic are illustrated by Dominique Mathieu in the essay presenting the exhibition.  So, if it cannot be denied “the fact that the commercial value of the artwork remains, from a capitalistic point of view, higher than its value in use”,  Bataille says that “the sun gives without ever receiving” and that art is “The Gift”. Then, once that the basic needs of survival and production have been met, this allows us to assume and spend surplus energy "for nothing".  All  the works on show prove that “tribute must be paid to the unproductive expenditure of art and the “loss-making pleasure” that accompanies it.  Therefore, for art, it can be said that it’s “the crazy energy that sometimes leads us to experience things that are “pointless”, that it can be “an endeavour to pay tribute to the omnipotence of Nature, which our civilisation has the almost structural desire to constantly oppose”, that ” It is a key that opens the doors of excessiveness, ushering in new perspectives that have no productive goals but are open to every possible outcome.”

Artists: Béatrice Balcou, Patrick Bouchain, Ícaro Lira, Dominique Mathieu, Marianne Mispelaëre, Gianni Pettena, The Play, Matthieu Saladin, Endre Tót, les gens d’Uterpan, Lois Weinberger, Zapatistes.

PARIS

October 15, 2019

Maison de l’Architecture,Ile-deFrance,

7pm to 9pm

GIANNI PETTENA

TEXT ART ARCHITECTURE

Inaugural session of the monthly seminar

Through the lines: variations on the textual space

OCTOBER 2019 – JUNE 2020

The seminar proposes to reflect on the relationships between literature and architecture. The book as an inhabited space, as well as the architecture  to be discovered by words, involve overlapping theoretical, poetic and technical thoughts: both disciplines  share the notion of space. This  cycle of nine debates aims  to develop a transversal thinking, by involving several fields: architecture, philosophy, literature, visual and graphic arts.

Campo Umano - Public Art 50 years after

Curated by Luca Cerizza and Zasha Colah

Conference:

21 - 22 September 2019

Villa Olmo (via Simone Cantoni 1, Como)

Exhibition: 

Opening: 21 September 2019, 7pm

21 September - 26 October 2019

borgovico33 (via Borgo Vico 33, Como)

http://www.fondazioneratti.org/news/322/campo_umano_-_arte_pubblica_50_anni_dopo

From its title, the project addresses Campo Urbano, the art-event curated by Luciano Caramel that occupied the public spaces of the Italian town of Como for one day on 21 September 1969 with a number of artistic ephemeral interventions; often disorienting for Como’s residents and local press. 

Conceived as a two-day conference and an exhibition, Campo Umano - Public Art 50 years after, celebrates the 50th anniversary of that exhibition-event, reconsidering its merits and failures in its wider historical and artistic context.
The presentations on Saturday are devoted to public art events that took place between the late 60s and early 70s (Alessandra Acocella, Luca Cerizza, Alessandra Pioselli, Francesco Tedeschi, and Tommaso Trini), and an in-depth focus on Campo Urbano through the testimony of many of its protagonists (Giuliano Collina, Mario Di Salvo, Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, Franca Sacchi, and Grazia Varisco). 

As the title itself suggests, the exhibition deals with the subject of  the ethics of each person when related to other individuals and, as a consequence, the responsibility of each one towards society for what concerns the making of a common sensibility.  In the show the subject is interpreted by 31 well-known national and international artists whose works are on exhibit in a location such as Pompei which suggests ideas of ceaseless transformation and discovery of objects, in this case contemporary, thus telling the history of a community.

Claude  Closky, Dominique Mathieu, Marianne Mispelaëre, Hans-Walter Müller, Gianni Pettena, Matthieu Saladin, les gens d'Uterpan, Lois Weinberger  

Each with its own approach and subject, the works of the eight artists on exhibit at the Salle Principale gallery share a common field of investigation, that of the political challenge coming from space constraints. Each in its own way, they give out, negotiate with, penetrate, occupy, free or comment on a space, be it urban, architectonic, memorial, advertising, technological or scientific, in its different aspects, either public or private.

The exhibition takes its lead from the baroque space of the church of San Paolo Converso.  It speaks therefore of Baroque and its evolution as well as of a new contemporary idea of Baroque and a concept of modern conversion/transformation as imagined by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his never realized movie on the conversion of Saint Paul.

Conversion as change in forms, ideologies and behaviors of society and the body.

Gianni Pettena’s reaction to the baroque environment are the proportions of ‘sezione aurea’.

Exhibition Utopie Radicali: Florence 1966-1976  at CCA, Montreal
(Canadian Centre for Architecture - Montreal) till October, 7 2018. 

Curated by Pino Brugellis, Gianni Pettena and Alberto Salvadori.

Press release - Installations views - Audio introduction - Opening Conversations:

CCA WEB SITE

The Second Yinchuan Biennale

Starting from the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge

June 9–September 19, 2018

Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan

Yinchuan, China

www.moca-yinchuan.com

The MOCA Yinchuan is the first contemporary art museum in North-Western China. The city of Yinchuan (Ningxia region) lies below the Gobi Desert and above the Yellow River. The routes leading to the city were once those of the Silk Road. Yinchuan was the last station on the silk road. Here, where the desert ends amidst the countryside, diverse eco-systems encountered one another and stratified, serving as guarantors of biodiversity. It is a place of encounter of the nomadic and the stationary, shepherds and farmers, minorities of various origins, smooth spaces and striated fields, immaterial and material cultures. 

The Second Yinchuan Biennale, under the artistic directorship of Marco Scotini, will be staged not only along the 15,000 square meters of the contemporary art museum, but will also exploit the Hui Nongqu Eco-Park and the International Artists Village. Much space will be given over to the issue of ecology and agriculture, another to that of alternative education and the book as paradigm; and yet another still to the coexistence of minorities.

Among the many international artists involved, Gianni Pettena will exhibit images of the series “About non conscious architecture” (1972-73), a research theme of his work that most clearly fits within the range of subjects explored by the exhibition.    

GIANNI PETTENA

Le permis de penser  (Licence to think)

Gallery Salle Principale, Paris

March 3 – May 12 2018

Opening March 2,  5 to 9 pm

"Io sona la spia": the man holding the sign bearing these words is a free man. Being free, from Pettena’s standpoint, means ignoring the zeitgeist, soaring above burdensome conformism, and emancipating oneself from the group and its convergent views. This is a surprise event, free from all restricted thoughts, be they conventional or radical. With this unexpected gesture, Pettena puts us in mind of Marcel Duchamp’s refusal "to be an artist in today’s sense of the word", nor yet an "anti-artist", preferring instead the term "anartist". This stance allowed Duchamp to push to the limits all kinds of references which lead to associations that art (or anti-art) institutions would be all too able to pick up on. The same is true of Pettena, whose position is neither one of acceptance, nor one of flat-out refusal, but instead takes him into a place very few people venture into for fear that they may be unable to get out again. This is how Pettena, who stands at the junction between different worlds, opens our eyes to a kind of architecture that we cannot see. He is, and will always be, an “anarchitect”.

The exhibition at Salle Principale looks back over 50 years of anarchitectural activity, which began in 1967 in Florence.

READ MORE...

MURALNOMAD

Le Quadrilatère, Beauvais

February 23 – August 19  2018

Opening, February 23 2018, 6 pm

Dominique Mathieu, curator of this exhibition on the art of contemporary tapestry, was inspired, as the title shows, by Le Corbusier’s idea of “muralnomad” according to which for the architect “ a carpet or any tapestry should never be tought as necessarily related to a piece of furniture, neither for dimensions nor for location”.  Through more than 40 works of artists and weaving craftsmen, including le Corbusier himself, the exhibition offers a careful analysis of tapestry artistic production in accordance with the evolution of all other contemporary artistic disciplines.  On exhibit, as well as on the poster introducing it, “Sprofondo” (1989),  tapestry by Gianni Pettena.

Link to Quadrilatère, Beauvais

ENERGY FREE TREE

GIANNI PETTENA for MUSEION

Bolzano/Bozen, from  November 23rd 2017, 7.30 pm

Even using something that seems by now to be completely useless, imitating nature but not damaging it, one can create a symbol for days traditionally considered of re-birth and peace.

www.museion.it

SUPERDESIGN

R & Company, New York

November 7, 2017 – January 4, 2018

R & Company presents SuperDesign, a survey of Italian Radical Design from 1965-1975, curated by Maria Cristina Didero. The exhibition has been over a decade in the making and has come together through extensive research, passionate collecting and frequent trips to Italy to interview protagonists of the movement.  Designers on exhibit are Piero Gilardi, Archizoom Associati, Studio 65, Gianni Ruffi, Kazuhide Takahama, Lapo Binazzi, Luigi Bandini Buti, Ugo La Pietra, . Studio A.R.D.I.T.I., Gino Marotta,  Gianni Pettena, Superstudio, Marion Baruch, Ettore Sottsass, Guido Drocco , Franco Mello and Gianfranco Frattini.

 The comprehensive survey highlights these leading figures and showcases a capsule collection of visionary works, alongside a selection of rare archival drawings and photography. as well as a feature length (62 minute) documentary directed by Francesca Molteni which presents interviews with pioneering designers and rare never- before-seen archival footage. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive book published by The Monacelli Press, written by Didero, with an introduction by R & Company principal Evan Snyderman and contributions from Deyan Sudjic and Catharine Rossi.

NOUVEAU PARCOURS AU MUSÉE ET NOUVELLE PRÉSENTATION DES COLLECTIONS CONTEMPORAINES 

CENTRE POMPIDOU, Paris

Opening, Thursday October 19th 2017, 6pm

Starting from this date, the Museum of Modern Art of the Pompidou Center presents a new arrangement of the 4th and 5th floors, where contemporary art since the end of the ‘60s will be on exhibit according to a temporal and thematic development.

Room 12 on the 4th floor,  Design and Poor Techniques/Global Tools, hosts works of the permanent collection of designers, architects and artists who agreed with the basic principles of that counter-school (Global Tools), i.e. the improvement and spreading of collective creativity and the social and political role of architecture. Gianni Pettena has on exhibit the original Wearable Chairs, created for the 1971 performance in Minneapolis, as well as the whole installation presented on  that same year at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Gianni Pettena

Spazio Vuoto Riservato a Gianni Pettena

Mar 29 - Apr 2  2017

Opening Wednesday March 29, 6.30-10 pm

MEGA, Piazza Vetra 21, Milan

 http://www.megamegamega.it

Gianni Pettena places his artistic / intellectual practice between conceptual and land art, with a leitmotif in which his belief always correlates with a physicalization related to the body and context scale. Spazio Vuoto Dedicato a Gianni Pettena, a project never seen before in Italy, investigates the deepest aspects of the lived space, a voyage to the discovery of another approach to the architectural discipline. This work runs between rupture and memory for a new definition of space and through the dichotomous relationship between full and empty. Through the use of performance, the artist is creating a gap with the term and the meaning of vacuum, in order to attribute it a new and thunderous symbolic value, so that the audience is brought to reflect on spatial experience lived by each individual. It is the act of the performance to generate the artistic moment, but it will be the end of the act to crystallize and formalize what remains, thanks to the continuous relationship between the inside and the outside of the space of MEGA. 

RELEVANT NOTES 

June 23 - July 30 2016

Cara Gallery, New York

http://caragallery-llc.com/index.php/exhibitions/

A collective exhibition that presents a dialogue between the work of 11 artists to explore the boundaries of disciplines among installation art, land art and architecture.  Exhibiting in a wide variety of medias including installation, drawing, photography, painting and sculpture – each created over the past five decades – act as relevant notes to the testimony of the artists’ interpretation of the concept of human intervention.

Relevant Notes, as an exhibition, comments on the temporary nature of spatial structures and the constant flux of our environment.  Physical and mental aspects of art making come through in order to express the importance of creating a history for a place and acknowledging the presence of the artist.

The 11 artists exhibited are Christo&Jeanne-Claude, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Matteo Berra, Igor Eskinja, Bruna Esposito, Franklin Evans, Diango Hernández, Andrés Jaques, Federico Luger, Jason Middlebrook,

Gianni Pettena.

Gianni Pettena will have on exhibit his big cardboard installation Grazia&Giustizia , which was built for the first time, and on the same day destroyed, in 1968.

UN ART PAUVRE  

June 8th - August 29th 2016

Pomipidou Centre, Paris

https://www.centrepompidou.fr

With the exhibition Un art pauvre  the Pompidou Center proposes a multidisciplinary and never-conceived-before survey of the idea of “poor” in the arts realm starting from the ‘60s: in the plastic arts, with the main focus on the Arte Povera movement, but also in the field of architecture and design, as well as music, theatre and experimental cinema.  Therefore, the show presents artists and members of movements whose research has vindicated the right to make archaic gestures through the use of “poor” materials  which  acquired for them a strong symbolic power.  The Arte Povera movement is extensively presented in Gallery 4 where the influence of Fontana, Manzoni and Burri is explained and about forty works of the best known representatives of the movement are exhibited.

On the fifth floor of the Museum, in the exhibition “Architecture et Design.  Around Global Tools (1973-75)”,  the subject of “poor” is presented for what can also be detected in architecture and design in the same years, through drawings, models, photos, and objects mostly realized within Global Tools, a “counter-school” of design founded in 1973 by some members of the Architettura Radicale movement. The  school intended to teach and tried to practice a kind of alternative knowledge based on handicraft, poor materials and experimentation in the urban environment. The Radical Architecture movement (so called by Germano Celant) had in fact many and strong connections with Arte Povera because acting was considered by the “radicals” more important than planning and their architecture was deeply influenced by visual arts as both were looking for new ideas on the political and social environment.  All the works presented in the exhibition, by Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, Michele De Lucchi, Ugo La Pietra, Riccardo Dalisi, Franco Raggi  and Gianni Pettena clearly show their authors’ wish for a different use of the city, either by acting on a public space or through a criticism of the consumers’ society: and so, the objects which Riccardo Dalisi realized together with the children of a Naples neighbourhood, the “Vertical dwellings” by De Lucchi, the lamps by Raggi and Binazzi, the “Design metaphors” by Sottsass, and the big installation “Wearable chairs” by Gianni Pettena that, although made in the USA some years before (1971), is an example that seems particularly in tune with the general concept of the exhibition.  A rich documentation (posters, invitations, magazines, photographs, etc,), most of which never presented before, is also exhibited, both about Global Tools’ activity and some exhibitions where there was a direct contact between ‘arte povera’ artists and ‘radical’ architects.

The Unarchivable

April 8th – June 15th 2016

Frigoriferi Milanesi, via Piranesi 10 - Milan 

 http://www.frigoriferimilanesi.it/

The opening of the exhibition The Unarchivable, curated by Marco Scotini in collaboration with Lorenzo Paini, coincides with the 2016 edition of the modern and contemporary art fair Miart. The exhibition presents a survey on the Italian artistic scene in the 1970s. The “unarchivable” refers to the emergence of multiple social forces and multidisciplinary approach that characterized the 1970s in Italy.

The exhibition includes 200 artworks by 60 artists - among which Vincenzo Agnetti, Carla Accardi, Alighiero Boetti, Gianfranco Baruchello , Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Piero Gilardi, Paolo Icaro, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Fabio Mauri, Ugo Mulas, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vettor Pisani, Franco Vaccari, Gilberto Zorio - coming from the most important Italian collections. The works will be divided in different sections.

Musical scores by Sylvano Bussotti, Giuseppe Chiari e Luigi Nono  will be on exhibit as well as Radical architecture here represented by  Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, Ettore Sottsass e Superstudio,  and other fields of art such as books, cinema and photography.

Sentiment of Beauty. La bellezza messa in luce. 
Biblioteca Statale Lucca. 1.4.2016, 4,30 pm.

On April 1 Gianni Pettena will take part, as one of the speakers, at the workshop "Sentiment of Beauty" (Beauty in the light) for his vision of "archictecture of light".

LA VILLE AU LOIN

(The city by now faraway)

Frac Centre-Val de Loire, Orléans - 1.04.2016 / 18.09.2016

http://www.frac-centre.fr

As the traditional idea of city is changing and has by now moved away to a distance which tends to cover the whole territory, the exhibition proposes a plunge into the seething life of the city, trying to capture both the intimacy of a street corner and the vastness of cityscapes.

Now that the Earth has become a set of urban proximities, how are these local systems installed, and how do hopes (if any) about what is far away resist and persist? The path of this show is situated in the interstice between these two questions.

The principle behind the exhibition is based on selecting a work from each of the collections of the 22 other Fracs, in dialogue with the collection of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire and the works of African invited artists. In this way the Frac is carrying on its tradition of a place of disciplinary migrations for art and architecture.

The public is greeted by Franco Raggi’s Tenda Rossa., a work that like the collection as a whole, introduces the exhibition in the form of a creative wandering, overlapping as much with painting as with sculpture and architecture.

The visitor, as spectator and actor, walks through the exhibition the way he strolls in the city. The specific position of the individual is at the core of Gianni Pettena’s work Paper/Midwestern Ocean (the work is part of the 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine collection). The artist fills a room with stripes of paper which the public cuts in order to make room for itself. The spectator himself becomes therefore part of the work.

A little further on, Eko’Polis, an imaginary city devised by the Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh plunges the spectator into a captivating acoustic world.

“La ville au loin” ends with a fable, Medium total, by Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth, a tale which imagines an architecture that has become a mutant biological organism.

In this way, through eighty works by artists and architects, the exhibition is a chance for an urban walk both near and far. We come upon a Tower of Babel, a telephone booth, and a skyline of towers.

For the whole period of the exhibition it will be possible to see a video-interview to Gianni Pettena by the new Director, Abdelkader Damani, on the Frac Centre-Val de Loire website.

In the occasion of the Month of Contemporary Architecture, “La ville au loin” is conceived like a narrative in four acts, besides Orléans, in Rouen, Montpellier and Marseille. At the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, for example, a monographic show is presenting the work of Superstudio, one of the major groups in radical Italian architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. 

ALLURES, Frac Centre, Orléans, 9.10.2015-21.02.2016 

http://www.frac-centre.fr/

Allures (Aspects) proposes to explore a selection of works from the Frac Centre-Val de Loire Collection, among which some recent acquisitions (Passi, Superstudio, Cantafora), as well as works previously unseen or rarely shown at Turbulences (Niedermayr, Pettena, EZCT, Labdora, Andrault & Parat), the respective singularities of which help us perceive how they might express the notion of urban and architectural ‘presence’. 

Allures opens up to the field of visionary thought on unprecedented, significant, and liberated forms, through a selection of works that falls within the ‘implementation’ of striking figures of a promising discontinuity (Archizoom Associati, UFO, Superstudio). Allures also opens up to the perception of a state that is both rediscovered and renewed, infused with history and replayed memories (Libeskind), manipulated (Casebere, Pettena) or remotivated (Ian+) reality. 

Drafts, sketches, grids, histograms, typologies, plans, blueprints, templates, models, photographs or moving images… Whether they represent the reality of the hand’s gesture or the expression of a digital tool, the point is to envision these works in their seminal state of frailty which shapes its forces and densities. The presence of invited contemporary artists and architects (Farah Atassi, Eva Le Roi, Studio sNCDA, Office KGDVS, Vincent Lamouroux, Hayoun Kwon) blends in with exhibits from the Collection. Symmetries come into play, breaking through any containment attempts, questioning our methods of organising and defining knowledge, (re)cognition, and perception of what is tangible.

Museum of Contemporary Arts - Lissone - MB     

www.museolissone.it 

CALENDAR

Thursday October 8, 9 pm

Lapo BINAZZI

Ugo LA PIETRA

Adolfo NATALINI

Thursday October 15, 9 pm

Aldo CIBIC

Nanda VIGO

Thursday October 22, 9pm

Massimo IOSA GHINI

Franco RAGGI

Thursday, November 19, 9 pm

Franco PURINI

Vincenzo TRIONE

 “Il cinema degli architetti”

book  presentation

Gianni PETTENA will introduce all meetings.

Great names of architecture and design will be at the Lissone MAC for four meetings centered on the protagonists and main trends of the last forty years.

These appointments are meant by the museum as a way to look into the radical and postmodern architecture in such a way as to make the audience aware of the works and researches that had questioned the meaning and role of architecture in those years.

By listening to some of the main actors of the international scene, it will then be possible to rethink the aesthetics and traditional theories, based on utopia, irony, subversion, dissacration and eclecticism, that set on fire the last ‘third’ of the 20th century.

The City of Lissone, through the activity of its Museum of Contemporary Arts, though not meaning any comparison, also intends to give a renewed value to a tradition in the field of design and architecture that has characterized  Lissone since the 19th century, when the city became known for its furniture manufacturing.  Here, for example, in 1870 the Professional School of Design and Carving was founded, and in the following years furniture fairs and exhibitions, such as the prestigious  “Settimana del Mobile” that started in 1936, were constantly presented and increased.

Museum of Contemporary Arts - Lissone - MB     

www.museolissone.it 

OPENING: SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 26th, 2015, 6 PM

The research of Emanuele Piccardo and  Amit Wolf, supported by the Graham Foundation  Woodbury University, centered on the relationship between art and environment, art and architecture in Italy and the US  in the ‘60s and ‘70s is now opening  at the Lissone Museum of Contemporary Arts after its first edition  at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2014) and the following presentation in Italy  at Casa Masaccio Arte Contemporanea in San Giovanni Valdarno  (march-april 2015). Beyond Environment explores the interchange between architecture, conceptual art, land art, and performing  art that emerged through Italian architect Gianni Pettena’s collaboration with American artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in the 1970s, looking into the different meaning of environment in Europe and the USA in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and comparing the Italian and American contexts and the different aspects of the ’radical’ research in Europe and  of the land art and happenings in the USA. The exhibition combines works by Pettena, Kaprow, Smithson, Matta-Clark, as well as, from Pettena’s Italian and Florentine milieu, those of Superarchitecture and the Italian “Radical” groups UFO, Superstudio, 9999, Ugo La Pietra and Pietro Derossi. 

OPENING: FRIDAY  JUNE 26th 2015, 6.30 pm

From June 27th till September 7th 2015 the Palermo Gallery of Modern Art (GAM) will host a peculiar dialogue between paintings  by Marc William Zanghi, one of the  foremost  representatives of young Sicilian art proceeding on the path opened by the so-called “school of Palermo”, and some architectural statements made by Gianni Pettena, one of the protagonists of the architettura radicale movement that started in Florence in the late Sixties.

The project is part of a series of exhibitions by the GAM that are meant to underline the value of the contemporary artists who are now active in Sicily.  The peculiarity of this appointment is the stress put on the dialogue between the object viewed and the viewer, the contents and the container – something that Zanghi has always underlined -  thanks to the presence of the installations by Gianni Pettena who is here also showing works originally made in Palermo in 1968.

The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Bruni will present 30 between paintings and sculptures by Marc William Zanghi within the spaces of the Palermo museum which were changed on purpose in their perception by means of three works by Gianni Pettena.

The pieces by Marc William Zanghi are exhibited starting with six new large paintings showing imaginary forests, between exotic and phantasy.  Then one finds four thin installation/sculptures, miniature heads recalling archeological finds, made in acrylic and polyurethane resin, and finally fifteen more canvases belonging to periods of previous production, assembled according to  new concepts on the ‘anti-hero’.  Besides all this, two works on paper never published before and two  glass containers with more sculptures/heads will be on show. 

The works by Gianni Pettena are three statements on space meant to “unhinge” the usual relationship between container and contents on which western architecture is based.  This is obvious for the “wearable chairs”  that were originally used for a performance/happening in the city center of Minneapolis in 1967 and that will be worn by some students on the day of the opening at the Gam in a “surreal” action.   Later on, the chairs will be exhibited hanging  in the middle of the room like an unusual  sculpture/installation. 

In the second room another piece by Pettena will be on show, APPLAUSI, a portable suitcase where the light on this word  goes on and off, a work that was originally created in 1968 for the 6^th Avantgarde Music Festival at the Teatro Biondo in Palermo and that was later presented at the 6^th Berlin Biennal in 2010.  This statement, originally meant as an ironical challenge with regard to the then beginning television audience, gets here a different, sour dimension, due to the absence of an audience in the digital global world, where everyone thinks of himself as an active protagonist.  The space of the third room will be organized in a unique way through the  installation “MILITE IGNOTO” (Unknown Soldier), with standing letters made in cardboard, each two meters high.  Connected with this, two other installations will be seen in the outside spaces of the Museum, with the words “CARABINIERI” and “GRAZIA&GIUSTIZIA”, of which the latter was built for the first time in Palermo in 1968 for a performance/procession in the streets of the city.

Curators Gianni Pettena, Davide Turrini, Mauro Lovi

June 13 th – November 1st 2015

Orario: 11-13, 16-20. Chiuso il lunedì.

Opening Friday June 12th 2015, 6 pm

The idea of dedicating an exhibition to Tuscan design, comes as part of the initiative Piccoli Grandi Musei 2015. Toscana ‘900. Musei e Percorsi d’arte, with the support of the Lucca Cassa di Risparmio Foundation.

Curated by Gianni Pettena, Davide Turrini and Mauro Lovi, the exhibition intends to present the production firms which in many areas have taken root in Tuscany and have contributed to the image of contemporary Italian design in the world.

Through the work of important Italian and international designers, the exhibition emphasizes the vital role of the productive realities of the region, pointing out their ability to select and attract talents, especially from the world of art and architecture, and define with them the design and construction of objects and everyday products. The exhibition features and is divided into various sectors of production: furniture, everyday objects in porcelain, ceramic, glass and crystal, marble design and graphics.

Exhibition location: Fondazione Centro Studi Ragghianti  

Complesso Monumentale di San Micheletto - Via San Micheletto  3, Lucca

www.fondazioneragghianti.it