nw9
Press Statement
Franco Mazzucchelli: "Art To Abandon"
Exhibition at nw9
From 8 July Until 30 September 2022
Neue Weyerstrasse 9, 50676 Cologne
Press release by Dr. Corinna Thierolf
Former Hauptkonservatorin | Head of Postwar Art
Kunst ab 1945 | Post War Art
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen
The art venue nw9 in Cologne, which opened in 2021, is developing into a place for discovering contemporary art. From 8 July to 30 September an overview of the work of Franco Mazzucchelli will be presented. The work of an artist, who was born in Milan in 1939 and lives there, has been shown internationally in major presentations in recent years, including 2018 at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, 2020 at the Kunsthalle Wien, 2021 at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and since 2021 at MACRO in Rome.
In 1964, Mazzucchelli, after classical studies in painting and in the midst of his studies in sculpture at the Academia di Brera, which he completed with Marino Marini, surprised the artistic scene with interventions that cannot be assigned to any of these genres: in the French Camargue, he installed a large-scale spiral-shaped object made of inflated polyethylene on the beach. The public was not invited; rather, for his personal viewing, the artist placed the original form of a spiral in the wavy sand dunes in what was then a very modern and inexpensive material. He also undertook field research because he was interested in who would react to this unusual object in this unartistic place and in what way. What would the object be understood as? How would viewer and “thing” relate to each other?
To this day, Mazzucchelli is all about discovering unexplored horizons. But while his objects could be found in a context outside the established art world in the early years and up to around 1979 without instructions for use, since then they have challenged the viewer, as in nw9, primarily in gallery and museum spaces. On the one hand, the accent is on transient, performative processes that intervene in life itself; on the other hand, it calls for an examination of works of art that stand out from their surroundings as objects. It is amazing to observe how carefully Mazzucchelli planned the survival of his earliest works, which he seemingly tossed into the art world as lightly and casually as a balloon filled with air.
In the compact Cologne retrospective, you can get an idea of how openly and attentively Mazzucchelli examines the concept of the work of art, how he constantly discovers new facets and makes them available to the visitor for further exploration. Passers-by, whose thoughts are more likely to be on the next business meeting in the traffic-heavy and office-dominated district of nw9, will see videos of Mazzucchelli behind the room's frameless, floor-to-ceiling windows - opening up a different horizon. They document his interventions in urban space, including in 1971 in front of the Alfa Romeo production site in Milan, where he released strange objects. If he originally wanted to make these objects available to children, they aroused the playful spirit of the workers who unexpectedly came out of the factory. Here, as in the other examples, the films document the well-considered, yet spontaneously decided, unchoreographed events. People passing by were not forced into the usual spectator role, rather, participation was possible and it was allowed to bring joy, which was intended as a serious alternative to the rigidity of the culture industry. The actions have created one or two traffic jams and probably caused some reflection on the light and the heavy, on the inside and the outside, on stability, possible pressure loss and the emergence of a situation that previously seemed utopian - the latter can be seen in the film that depicts the construction of a colossal plastic corridor in a square in Cava Manara near Pavia in 1976. Thanks to Mazzucchelli's intervention, an interior space was created on what was once an open space, which visitors could explore like a transparent belly.
Most of the objects that the artist used during such actions no longer exist. But Mazzucchelli continues to produce them, sometimes varying their shape, color, and size. The spiral in the exhibition is therefore not a relic of his action in southern France, nor is the cone a relic of the action in Volterra in 1973. The objects can remind us of this, but what counts is the effectiveness of a sculptural idea that now comes into force in every visitor. A similar position is taken by the compositions in which Mazzucchelli puts together photographs of his actions, sometimes a piece of plastic of the objects used and a brief caption that titles his actions and places them in a larger body of work.
The pictorial “Bieca Decorazione”, which have been created since the 1990s, corresponds most closely to a classic work concept. But what are these images whose content is air? One would only have to open the stopper and air would escape and the venerable geometry of the black square would collapse. As the title of these works suggests, they are “Art To Abandon” – a description that can also be appropriately applied to Mazzucchelli's work, which can now be discovered in exemplary examples in Cologne.
The nw9, named after its location at Neue Weyerstrasse 9 in Cologne, continues the impulses of Michael and Eleonore Stoffel, who, until their deaths in 2005 and 2007, worked in an exemplary manner for the mediation of art in Germany and in the 1960ties also commissioned the well-known first terrace house in Cologne as a residential and commercial building from architect Professor Erwin H. Zander.
contact
nw9 is open Fridays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment.
For appointments, please contact info@nw9.space.
nw9
Kunstraum der Stiftung Kunstwissenschaft Köln
Neue Weyerstraße 9
50676 Köln