Opening: Tuesday January 18, 6 pm
From January 19 through March 9 2012
Opening hours: Mon-Fri 3-7.30 pm 15.00‐19.30, or by appointment
Gianni Pettena’s solo exhibition, showing both his historical and contemporary oeuvre, will take place simultaneously at Galleria Enrico Fornello and at Galleria Federico Luger in Milan.
Gianni Pettena has always researched on the space between art and architecture, companion of Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, he was one of the founders of the “radical architecture” movement in Florence in the sixties. From the end of the sixties and all the seventies he worked in Italy, and in the United States, in the South West desert and in the suburban areas in different cities in the Mid and South West.
His first solo show took place in 1972 at the mythic John Weber Gallery in New York, and from that moment on he develops his artistic activities together with his diverse academic ones.
Currently, in continuity with those years, and with the same tools, Pettena’s research, through video, installations, performances, architecture, can be defined as a construction produced with the instruments of art and nature. It works as an encyclopaedia of spatial statements, theorizations and “physicizations” that helps to understand the world, between nature and artifice, to eliminate conflicts, and to make nature prevail for once with its laws transcribed also in architecture, as the system of the golden section, and the laws of spatial perception.
Pattena’s space retrieves contemplation, the conscious observation of places, the presence of the past as teaching, the need of critique and of irony in the reading of a physical world where the presence of men finds congruence and resonance with nature, from which it derives rules of behaviour.
Both exhibitions dialogue and integrate: two different spaces interpreted as one divided space, in which speeches overlap in the same language.
Gianni Pettena (Bolzano 1940) - founder at the end of the ’60 in Firenze of the movement “radical architecture” together with Superstudio, Archizoom, UFO - in 1971 was invited to the United States as artist-in-residence at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the following year to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1972 he had his first solo show at John Weber Gallery in New York. In the following years he dedicated simultaneously to his activities as artist and as an academic, researching on the relationships between the proposals of the younger generations, and those of the experimentations initiated in the ’60. He is the first “radical architect” to which the FRAC Centre de Orleans dedicated a great anthological show (Gianni Pettena. Le métier de l’architecte, 2002) accompanied by a bilingual (Italian-English) monograph on the artist published the following year by Silvana Editoriale (Gianni Pettena 2003). Gianni Pettena’s works, particularly the ones of the so-called “American period” and many of his drawings were so visionary so as to became later a prophetic reality and assume now a value that is considered historical, not only because of their uniqueness and specificity within the radical experimentation of the sixties and seventies, but also because of its influence on the architectural, artistic and design fields. His work has been showcased in the most prestigious exhibitions, museums and institutions national and internationally, among which the Biennale di Venezia, Mori Museum in Tokyo, PAC in Milan al Barbican Center in London, GAMEC in Bergamo, at the Pompidou Paris and Metz, at the Berlin Biennale and at the Italian Pavilion in the Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
Gianni Pettena – Solo show
Federico Luger
Milano Via Circo, 1
From January 19 through March 9 2012
Mon-Fri 3-7.30 pm 15.00‐19.30, or by appointment
Opening: Tuesday January 18, 6 pm
