Christian Fogarolli: Breakdown
Galerie Mazzoli, Berlin
June 4 - July 27, 2024
Breakdown is Christian Fogarolli's second solo exhibition at Galerie Mazzoli's Berlin venue.
In Christian Fogarolli's artistic practice, past and present intertwine in works that hybridize different expressive methods: photography, installation, sculpture, and painting; traces and fragments of an indefinite time bind themselves to vitreous, mirroring, metallic, organic and technological materials.
The exhibition offers the public the opportunity to interact with a body of new installation works in which the separation of body and mind, normality and deviance are questioned, with the intention of stimulating a reflection on the normative attributions of illness, marginalization and categorization in our society.
Breakdown presents a path involving the destruction of images, whether real or false; figures and features are subjected to physical strain through tools, utensils or actions that invade their surface, extracting a living matter from them.
In the large installation entitled Le Pendu, for example, photographic images from old asylums’ archives are manipulated into abstract shapes and subsequently hooked to metal chains and hung from the walls like bodies or shreds of flesh in a butcher’s wearhouse. Le Pendu literally embodies the marginalization of the sick. It epitomizes the annihilation of humanness, transforming a portrait into a severe sculpture, a seemingly organic element that emanates the reminiscence of a useless existence. Similarly, in the works Cut memories and Crush test, metal sheets imprinted with pigments are compressed, cut, and crushed by a dough cutting machine and a bench vise respectively. Such brutal manipulations function as actions of memory destruction as well as metaphors for the constant psychological pressures present in contemporary society.
The technological installation Eternal Return, on the other hand, reflects on the concepts of repetition and individuality. This piece portrays a clock mechanism juxtaposed to a green-colored glass fragment that reproduces itself endlessly through an optical effect. Due to the reflective nature of the work’s surface, the viewer’s own image is reverberating within it. In this case, Fogarolli challenges the representation of the viewer him/herself, whose face is again dehumanized to become part of a living mechanism, a technological contraption reminding us that we exist not only as singularities, but as context-dependent, replaceable and duplicable cogs in clock wheels driven by forces, starting with time, beyond our control.
The above described works exemplify the peculiar traits of the exhibition, and more in general of Christian Fogarolli’s production as a whole, which consistently expounds a form of psychological conceptualism that is polymorphic in nature as much as it is thematically coherent. The title of the exhibition, Breakdown, in its multiple meanings of collapse and classification, perfectly summarizes such traits. In Breakdown the combination of sculpture, painting, print, and found objects allows Christian Fogarolli to reaffirm his fascination with archival practices and human psychology, and to create a set of artworks whose originality is evident as much as is his desire to drive the public to self introspection and criticism.
CHRISTIAN FOGAROLLI - BIOGRAPHY
Born in Trento in 1983, Christian Fogarolli obtained a degree in archeology in 2007 to then pursuing his historical-artistic studies with a master’s degree in 2011 at the University of Trento, alongside a master’s degree in diagnostics and restoration of works of art at the University of Verona. Since 2011, he has been dedicated to studies and research of artistic, philosophical, and historical practices.
The results of his research have been displayed in events such as dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); MART, Museum of Modern and Contemporary art of Rovereto (2013); The Maison Rouge in Paris (2014); Museum of the Foundation Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona (2015); de Appel arts centre of Amsterdam (2015); 5th Moscow International Biennale in Moscow (2016); the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow (2017); Gaîté Lyrique of Paris (2017); Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2017); Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (2018); MAXXI, the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome (2018); Fortuny Palace Museum, Venice (2018); Musée de Grenoble (2019); Musée d’histoire de la Médecine in Paris (2020); MARe Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucarest (2020); STATE Experience Science in Berlin (2020); Löwenbräukunst Art Center e schwarzescafé Luma Westbau in Zurich (2020); Fondation Gschwandner Reaktor in Wien (2020); GAM Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin (2020); MAMM Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow (2020); Benetton Foundation in Treviso (2021); MAMbo, Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna (2022); CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2022); MART, Galleria Civica, Trento (2014-18-23); Fundación Telefónica in Madrid (2023).
He received research and residency awards at the College of Physicians and Mütter Museum, Philadelphia (2018); Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague (2018); Italian Council Prize granted by the Italian Ministry of the Culture, Rome (2019); A Collection Prize, Vicenza; Boghossian Foundation - Villa Empain, Bruxelles (2024).
GALERIE MAZZOLI
Eberswalder Strasse 30, 10437 Berlin
