DANIEL SPOERRI. From Trap-pictures to Prillwitz Idols.

By Thomas Levy, Barbara Räderscheich, Sandra Solimano

March 25 - June 20

Museo di arte contemporanea di Villa Croce –

Via Jacopo Ruffini 3 - Genova (Italia)

The solo exhibition, opened on the occasion of Daniel Spoerri’s 80th birthday, is part of a cycle which the Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce dedicated to the great artists of the 20th century, from Duchamp to Beuys and Allan Kaprow.

This event offers an overall critical view of one the leading figures in contemporary art, starting from his joining the Nouveau Realism art movement in October 1960 to the present. The exhibition’s itinerary begins in the “Stanza del Camino”, on the Villa’s first floor, with some of the most recent sculptures of the series “Prillwitz Idols”: The Warrior, The Diver, The Monster-Crab. Spoerri created them in 2005 giving final bronze versions of his previous assemblages of both aberrant and fantastical figures. A section of The Genetic Chain of the Flea Market, mounted on the walls of the entrance staircase, takes the visitor straight up to the Museum’s second floor. The first three rooms present the Daniel Spoerri’s best known works, the Tableaux-pièges (Traps , from his historical creations of the 60’s and 70’s to his more recent re-examinations, especially the Sevilla Series “Eaten by…”. The principle of seriality is crucial to Spoerri’s absolutely innovative way of conceiving art. The artist theorised his viewpoint at the end of the 50’s (1957/1959) in the review “Material”, one of the first collections of concrete and ideogrammatic poetry. In 1959-60 he created edition M.A.T. (Multiplication of Transformable Art) which, in opposition to the idea of the uniqueness of a work of art, represents the first example of multiplied art undermining the traditional artistic processes.

The following section presents the photographic assemblages, Criminal Investigations, the collages of L’encyclopédie de Diderot et D’Alembert, the compositions of The Carnival of Animals, and, in the last room the powerful structures of Corps en morceaux (Bodies in pieces) . Each thematic section hosts one of the Prillwitz Idols sculptures, stressing the circular nature of Spoerri’s research. The exhibition shows how Spoerri’s work changed and developed in time while maintaining a coherent visionary inspiration which produced an almost endless series of hybridized creatures, both biological and inanimate, a sort of impossible cataloguing of the phantoms of the unconscious.

The exhibition continues on the second floor with some of Spoerri’s best known series: form the Histoire de Boîtes à lettres to Les Lepreux d’Islande (Iceland Lepers), from the Background Landscapes to some works of the series of Collections which emphasize the artist’s inclination for mental bricolage before it becomes manual.

Daniel Spoerri’s retrospective at the Museum of Villa Croce in Genoa, the city where his art has always been greatly appreciated by private collectors and galleries, shows the very close relationship between the artist and the museum. Villa Croce has already exhibited some of his works on two different occasions, in 1992 (exhibition: “Frammenti, interfacce, intervalli. Paradigmi della frammentazione nell’arte Svizzera” curated by Viana Conti) and in 2002 (exhibition “The Fluxus Constellation” by Sandra Solimano).

The exhibition is organized by the Museum in collaboration with Hamburg Artoma-Kunst-und-Kulturmanagament and Genova Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura.

Patronized by Pro Helvetia - Fondazione Svizzera per la Cultura, Consolato Generale di Svizzera a Genova, istituto Svizzero di Roma, AssociazioneLiguria e Piemonte Gallerie di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – ALPGAMC

Sponsor by Compagnia di NavigazioneIgnazio Messina & C.

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