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Dan Flavin

Whitewaller Milan 2019: What to See

This week, Whitewaller is in Milan for Salone del Mobile and miart.  Below, we’ve put together a list of top exhibitions to check out while in town.

Vincenzo Castella: Milano
BUILDING
Fashion District
Now—April 27
This spring, BUILDING presents a solo show of Vincenzo Castella, the internationally renowned artist capturing contemporary landscapes and manmade cityscapes. Through large-format images that establish an environment, “Vincenzo Castella, Milano” features views of famous Milanese Renaissance interiors, the urban environment, and the indoor collection of nature. Each photograph, we are reminded, is an investment of extreme care, quality, and detail, much like the city it documents, now home to the artist. “Vincenzo Castella, Milano” comprises thirty medium- and large-format works, over one hundred unpublished photographs, and three video projections—an unprecedented compendium of Castella’s photographs to appear in Milan.

“Lygia Pape”
Fondazione Carriero
 Certo Storico
Now—July 21
Organized in collaboration with Estate Projeto Lygia Pape, “Lygia Pape” is the first exhibition of the artist’s work to be held in Italy. Among the pioneers of Neoconcretism in Brazil, Lygia Pape worked for 45 years, weaving between media, chameleoning between conceptual frameworks. In drawing, sculpture, video, dance, installation, and photography, Pape synthesized European modernism, Russian Constructivism, and Brazilian culture. The exhibition at Fondazione Carriero explores works from 1952 to 2000 as a natural evolution, highlighting a continuing experimentation of form, origin, nature, and humankind while denuding her audience of expectations of viewership.

Emilio Tadini: 1967–1972
Fondazione Marconi Zona Buenos Aires
Now—June 28
Emilio Tadini’s paintings, drawings, and graphic works—“tales for images”—will unite at Fondazione Marconi from March 28 to June 28, 2019. With the intention of seeing anew the artist’s graphic and pictorial work, the exhibition focuses on a selection of art steeped in originality and conceptual thinking. Tadini’s work can be experienced on many levels and read in languages of art, literature, and psychoanalysis. Even what appears “real” is filled with metaphysical surrealism, requiring utter immersion in the moment, peeling back layers of meaning, parsing many linguistic disciplines.

Ibrahim Mahama
Fondazione Nicola Trussardi 
Caselli Daziari di Porta Venezia
Now—April 14
Confronting contemporary issues of globalization, migration, and borders, Ibrahim Mahama collects the relics of urban environments—jute, wood, textiles—and uses them to transform architectural structures. Jute, in particular, is a central medium of Mahama’s practice. Branded with manufacturers’ logos, jute sacks are symbols of transport and signs of the human labor that created them. For his Milan intervention, Mahama will wrap the tollhouses of Porta Venezia—a historic crossroads—in the material, metamorphosing the structures with new life, in transient devotion to the everyday makers and citizens of Milan.

Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin: Whether Line
Fondazione Prada 
Porta Romana
Now—August 5
Since meeting at the Rhode Island School of Design, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin have collaborated extensively—and globally. Their new commission by Fondazione Prada is a large-scale multimedia installation exploring the speculative nature of manifest destiny-attitudes and the misplaced faith in idealization of “new” territory. Immersing viewers in a soundscape and vision of distorted banality, Fitch and Trecartin create a map haunted by contortions of the familiar. Homesteads, fortifications, and digital arenas will converge to echo and challenge the comfort of escapism. A retrospective book of the artists’ collaboration will accompany the project.

“Surrogati: Un amore ideale”
Osservatorio Fondazione Prada 
Duomo City Center
Now—July 22
“Surrogati: Un amore ideale” (“Surrogate: A love ideal”) is an exhibition of 42 photographic works by American artists Jamie Diamond and Elena Dorfman, curated by Melissa Harris. Both artists explore the unexpected intimacy that emerges between people and synthetic beings. Dorfman, for example, captures men and women alongside sexual surrogates—synthetic, anatomically correct, life-size sex dolls. Diamond’s series, “Forever Mothers,” studies the mothering relationship between women and their hyperrealistic baby dolls. Neither artist intends to judge their subjects; their goal is to record a new tradition of love, born in new companions.

Umberto Riva
Fondazione Sozzani, 10 Corso Como 
Porta Volta
Now—May 5
In conjunction with miart and Salone del Mobile 2019, Fondazione Sozzani presents an exhibition of the design works of Umberto Riva. Winner of the 2003 gold medal for architecture from the Triennale di Milano, Sozzani has, for 60 years, experimented and explored space and its occupants, tracing geometry and form in lamps, furniture, graphics, and industrial design. In “Umberto Riva,” prototypes, unpublished sketches, and rare pieces will come together, as the “accerchiamento continuo di qualcosa che esiste al di fuori della tua volontà” (“Continuous encirclement of something that exists outside your will”).

Dan Graham
Francesca Minini Ventura District, Lambrate
Now—May 4
Guiding viewers as actors and observers, Dan Graham’s pavilions confound typical dynamics of time, reflection, and spectatorship. Crafted in glass that is both transparent and reflective, the space plays with perception, allowing participants on one side to see themselves, the structure, and a parallel audience on the other side, as image, subject, response, and public. In a conceptual dialogue—between artist, audience, and object—about perception and interaction, Graham also encourages sheer wonderment and sensitivity. The exhibition will display models and projects, which Graham considers autonomous sculpture.

Morbelli: 1853–1919
Galleria D’Arte Moderna 
Porta Venezia
March 14–June 16
Curated by Paola Zatti with the collaboration of Alessandro Oldani, Aurora Scotti, Giovanna Ginex, and the artist’s heirs, “Morbelli 1853–1919” reflects the titular artist’s interest in social realism and his research on natural light. Proceeding chronologically through Morbelli’s career, the exhibition begins with an early, sensitive tribute to his adopted city, Milan. Suffused with perception, Morbelli’s paintings of mondinas, for example, redefine and recompose typical Piedmontese fieldworkers within flooded plains. The exhibition introduces Morbelli’s incorporation of radical Divisionism, Symbolist language, social realism, and his blossoming into full artistic maturity.

Dan Flavin
Cardi Gallery Porta Nuova
Now—June 28
Presenting 14 light works from the 1960s to the 1990s, “Dan Flavin” at Cardi Gallery Milan will chart decades of color, light, and sculptural exploration by the eponymous American artist. Flavin (1933–1996) worked in his signature, commercial fluorescent light, over time paring down extraneous details to focus solely on the form of light itself. Ranging from lamps to room-sized environments, Flavin’s works challenge the way we perceive architectural space. But as for any transcendent, abstract meaning, Flavin insisted, “It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else.” The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Estate of Dan Flavin and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Cleo Fariselli: In Practica #7. Hydria 
Collezione Giuseppe Iannaccone Piazza San Babila
Now—July 12
“HYDRIA” by Cleo Fariselli is the seventh appointment of “In Pratica,” an ongoing project whereby emerging artists execute site-specific projects inside the studio of lawyer Giuseppe Iannaccone, the same space that houses a collection of works by established artists. “HYDRIA” will be a solo installation by Fariselli, within the space, focusing on water. Fariselli describes her inspiration as “restoring to the water its changing aspect, its generative capacity, its fascinating, mysterious and perturbing side.“ Fariselli intends for the environment to activate her works, to draw objects out of and beyond their spaces and encouraging the viewer’s eye to wander.

The Challenge: Tadao Ando
Armani/Silos Zona Tortona
April 9–July 28
Armani/Silos is presenting its first exhibition dedicated to architecture, “The Challenge,” which showcases the career of Tadao Ando. Designed by Ando and his studio in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, the exhibition is built around four themes: Primitive Shapes of Space, An Urban Challenge, Landscape Genesis, and Dialogues with History. The retrospective includes over 50 projects illustrated with sketches, original blueprints,
video installations, technical drawings, travel notes, and photographs taken by the architect. “I wish to create an architecture that will live on eternally—not in substance or form, but as a memory within people’s hearts,” said Ando.

Zhivago Duncan: Soulmate / Cellmate
Galleria Poggiala Zona Brera
Now—June 28
Indiana-born Zhivago Duncan considers himself a “perpetual foreigner.” Of Syrian and Danish descent, born in the United States and educated in the United Kingdom, Duncan has also lived in Europe and the Middle East. With a similarly diverse approach to his practice, Duncan questions his own sense of mastery, working variously in large-scale installation, performance art, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and painting. For Duncan, questioning representation and the language with which we deliver it is a means of cutting through routine and regaining our tabula rasa.

“Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival”
La Triennale de Milano Parco Sempione
Now—September 1
Featuring a thematic exhibition and participants from universities and institutions all over the world, “Broken Nature” demonstrates the potential of the combined strength and sensibility of design to improve the effects of revolutionary change. So themed around restorative design, the XXII
Triennale di Milano, “allows us to keep believing in the power of design to help citizens understand complexity, assess risks, adapt behaviors,
and demand change,” says Paola Antonelli, curator of “Broken Nature.” Commissions include works by waste-conscious duo Formafantasma,
Architect Neri Oxman and Mediated Matter Group, MIT Media Lab, the Beirut- and New York–based Sigil Collective, and the data-driven design firm with offices in Milan and New York, Accurat.

Ivan Seal
Monica de Cardenas 
Corso Como / Garibaldi
Now—May 11
In March, Monica de Cardenas opened a solo show of work by the Berlin-based artist Ivan Seal. In paintings that are simultaneously abstract and representational, Seal depicts ceramic-like subjects. Musically extending across the canvas, the ceramics emerge almost as galaxies—openly, spontaneously. The paintings rely on movement, improvisation, and the reserve of Seal’s artistic imagination, and, on the surface of the porcelain, light and painterly ephemera refract to a fantastic, surreal effect. The exhibition will run through May 11, 2019.

“FAR”
Nilufar Depot 
Lancetti
April 8—14
During Milan Design Week, Nilufar Depot will inaugurate “FAR”: an exhibition dedicated to disrupting its capacious gallery, as it exists. The immersive experiment within Nilufar pursues the gallery’s manifesto of “Discovering, Crossing, Creating” to push the perimeters of design, to subvert existing conversations, and to encourage productive tension. Curated by Valentina Ciuffi/Studio Vedèt, “FAR” gives emerging designers the space to transcend the accepted logic of design and embrace the complexities of language, layering, function, and collaboration—whether that means developing new materials, rethinking 3-D polymers, or pushing the bounds of car body painting techniques.

Anna Maria Maiolino: O AMOR SE FAZ REVOLUCIONÁRIO
Pac Padiglione D’Arte Contemporanea 
Porta Venezia
Now—June 9
Curated by Diego Sileo, “Anna Maria Maiolino: O AMOR SE FAZ REVOLUCIONÁRIO” wrestles with the insidious, dictatorial pressure of patriarchal systems on the female consciousness, particularly in relation to 1970s and ’80s Brazil. Anna Maria Maiolino (who moved to Brazil as a teenager) uses the vocabularies of video, photography, performance, sculpture, installation, and drawing to confront these transposed human relationships—how we express to ourselves and to each other, spiritually, physically, and intimately.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: CITTÀDIMILANO
Pirelli
HangarBicocca Bicocca
Now—July 21
“CITTÀDIMILANO” is a solo show by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, uniting works from the past decades of Calò’s career. Born in Venice, and currently based between Venice and the Netherlands, Calò has developed a unique, self-referential practice steeped in natural, symbolically rich elements and heavily conceptual materials through which he explores themes such as stratification and the passage of time. In “CITTÀDIMILANO,” Calò focuses specifically on sculptural practice, inviting viewers—through the projection of underwater images—to create their own story across a manufactured landscape. Traversing archival footage of a shipwreck, viewers will closely engage with geographic and symbolic questions of depth, dimension, data, and the beyond.

“Immersione Libera”
Palazzina Dei Bagni Misteriosi 
Zona Porta Romana
Now–May 18
On view in Milan from April 2 to May 18, “Immersione Libera” is a group show featuring 12 emerging artists. Germinating from Marina Nissim’s
desire to promote young creators, the exhibition promises to show “the most interesting proposals on the international scene.” “Immersione Libera” is
curated by Giovanni Paolin, in partnership with Galleria Continua, Teatro Franco Parenti e Associazione Pier Lombardo.

Sophia Al-Maria: Mirror Cookie
Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro 
Zona Porta Genova
Now–May 31
This spring, Fondazione Pomodoro presents solo exhibitions by three young, international artists, curated by Cloé Perrone. “Mirror Cookie” will be the first and will pursue the artist Sophia Al-Maria’s interest in the isolation and corrosion that emerge from technology, consumerism, and industry. Her installation “Mirror Cookie” features Bai Ling, a Chinese-American actress, overcoming the misogyny of Hollywood. Disconnected monologues and pep talks, performed in front of the mirror, implicate the viewer in her experience of racial and gender discrimination, for an overt commentary on expectations, celebrity, and discrimination.

Atelier Van Lieshout: Renegade
GIÓ MARCONI
Zona Buenos Aires
Now–April 28
From March 22 to April 18, 2019, GIÓ MARCONI gallery will display a solo show by Atelier Van Lieshout. Though the studio is self-titled (after its founder, Joep van Lieshout), its collaborative atmosphere and balanced approach to production undermine the trope of a singular artistic genius. The workshop today consists of 20 artists and designers, cooperating in large-scale public works, polyester objects, architecture, and brightly colored designs. In both practice and product, they observe power, politics, and the cycle of human life.

“Hypervisuality”
Palazzo Dugnani Turati
Now—April 14
Located in the baroque Palazzo Dugnani, “Hypervisuality” features six films from the Wemhöner Collection that “bridge the gap between the visible and the invisible.” Also flirting with a sense of alienation, the exhibition questions the possibilities of display and visuality, categorizing seeing as implicative, mediated, and reflective. In Fragile, a work by Masbedo, an Indian peacock wanders through the Old Masters at Galleria Sabauda in Turin, and, in doing so, different forms of heritage and beauty confront each other but do not meld—nurturing, perhaps, an experience parallel to
viewing “Hypervisuality,” which is ensconced among historic frescoes. Other films include Yang Fudong’s New Women, Masbedo’s 2’59’’, Isaac Julien’s Playtime, and Julian Rosefeldt’s The Swap and Deep Gold.

“MCMXXXIV”
Massimo de Carlo Piola
Now–May 18
The inaugural exhibition at Massimo De Carlo’s new Milan gallery space, “MCMXXXIV” responds to Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, its recently restored space. Built in the 1930s by Piero Portaluppi, the rationalist building was once a family home, then a corporate office—private uses of a building dressed in precious materials and carefully selected marbles. Massimo De Carlo and Francesco Bonami have collaborated to curate a public-facing exhibition inspired by this introspective, storied past, presenting key sculptures by Italian artists from 1930–40 in relation to contemporary artists. Featured artists include Fausto Melotti and Antonietta Raphaël, Pietro Roccasalva and Andra Ursuţa, Adolfo Wildt, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Rudolf Stingel.

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