Luca Frei, "TO IMAGINE ACTION" 23 April - 5 June 2004 PDF version | 34 kB (Adobe Acrobat Reader needed)

With the Luca Frei (* 1976) one-man exhibition, the gallery is expanding its activities to research into the most recent art generation, which will be included in the gallery’s programme in the future. Luca Frei is originally from Canton Ticino but has lived in Malmö, Sweden, for many years now. He works with various media – from drawing and painting to architectural structure, text and sculpture – each time creating installations, situations and subjects inspired by their location.

Frei has created four new works for the exhibition arranged in the gallery’s Spazio 2. The first room contains a large iron sculpture that looks like an abstract tree; hanging from the branches are hexagonal shapes in coloured Plexiglas that are refracted on the walls around it. It is surrounded by small iron benches with wooden seats covered with fabrics in the same colours as the Plexiglas shapes.

On the wall, a series of collages take their references from book titles, proposing new covers and, at the same time, presenting the decontextualised titles as an active part of the installation (the books mentioned include The Coming Community by G. Agamben, Revolt, She Said by J. Kristeva and Deschooling Society by I. Illich).

In the second room, a poster glued to the wall combines a photograph of the Beaubourg forecourt in Paris, used as a car park before the Centre Georges Pompidou was built, with a quote by Kodwo Eshun, “Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there”. On the opposite wall, a mural drawing portrays a life-size figure holding up hexagonal shapes identical to those that hang from the tree.

Based on research developed by Luca Frei over the last 2-3 years, the four works contain some of the most distinctive features of his artistic language: the elementary iconography inspired by children’s play (the tree, the benches), the figure drawn on the wall and the geometrical shapes (science formulae, absolute forms, Utopian symbols) , the investigation into the “so-called Utopia of the Beaubourg”, and the use of texts and quotations as a “visual bibliography”.

Along the lines of previous interventions, the set of works presented seeks to offer a platform for discussion and reflection on notions such as Utopia, education, language, models of thought, institutionalised structures and on themes such as the mediation of knowledge and information. Comparison with things from our everyday lives, familiar but taken out of context, invites us to experiment with new relationships and invent different mental maps.

By stimulating spectators to construct visual and intellectual relationships between the various elements proposed, Frei hopes to trigger flexible thought and breach the dimension of the possible.

A new issue of the magazine “temporale” (58/59, Edizioni Studio Dabbeni) is coming out for the Luca Frei exhibition, featuring a new interview with the artist by Marianna Garin and an article on the exhibition by Charles Esche.

Opening Friday 23 April - 18.00 Duration 23 April - 5 June 2004 Opening Hours Tuesday - Friday 09.30 - 12.00  14.30 - 18.30 Saturday 09.30 - 12.00  14.30 - 17.00 Sunday/Monday Closed