Tino Sehgal
11 Oct - 14 Dec 2008
From November 11 through December 14, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is proud to present Tino Sehgal’s first major exhibition in Italy, in the setting of Villa Reale, one of the city’s most spectacular historic buildings.
Villa Reale is home to Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, housing a collection of 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces by figures such as Antonio Canova, Medardo Rosso, Paul Cézanne, the futurists and many others. The history of the Villa is deeply rooted in Milan’s Napoleonic period.
This sumptuous building still preserves its lavish decorations and priceless original furnishings. In the frescoed and stuccoed halls of the vast villa on Via Palestro, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has invited British-born, German-based artist Tino Sehgal to present a unique, extraordinary selection of his human sculptures. This exhibition brings together the most ambitious and complete overview of his oeuvre to date, including new pieces presented alongside some of Sehgal’s most celebrated works.
Tino Sehgal is one of the most radical artists to emerge in recent years. His work is an art without objects which only exists as a set of gestures and oral instructions carried out by trained interpreters for the entire duration of the exhibition. Sehgal’s work immerses the audience in uncanny situations and intricate compositions executed by dancers, children, extras, museum guards, and art world professionals. Tino Sehgal acts like the director of a complex role-playing game, in which gestures and bodies are used to construct tableaux vivants of surreal beauty.
A visit to a Tino Sehgal exhibition is a sequence of encounters with living sculptures and people in movement, captured in hysterical poses or entwined in sensual embraces. Sehgal’s pieces are choreographies that are continuously executed for the entire duration of the show. For his first major exhibition in Italy, Tino Sehgal auditioned more than 300 men and women of all ages, including actors, dancers, professional singers, and ordinary people with different backgrounds. About 70 people were selected to interpret his work: camouflaged among the guards and the visitors, dozens of interpreters engage the audience in a new theatre of the absurd.
In This is New (2003), the crude reality of everyday life invades the museum setting, enacted by one of the guards who recites the day’s headlines. In This is So Contemporary (2005), as though possessed, other museum guards surround the public and break out into a joyful, unsettling dance. In This is Propaganda (2002), art calls its own power of communication into question: a guard of the museum starts singing a haunting, melancholic song which seems to comment upon Il Quarto Stato (1901) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, one of the most iconic painting in the history of Italian art.
Tino Sehgal’s work entertains a rich dialogue with history, while remaining firmly rooted in contemporary social practices and preoccupations. As part of his exhibitions viewers and actors are invited to exchange views, experiences and other forms of knowledge. Installed within the stucco and the golden framed mirrors of Villa Reale, Sehgal’s choreographies take on a ghostly presence but can also be read as carefully rehearsed conversation pieces of a new rococo.
In Kiss (2002), the bodies of two dancers roll around on the ground and re-enact poses from some of the most famous kisses in the history of art—from Antonio Canova, who happens to be featured in the Villa Reale collection, all the way to Jeff Koons. Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) is an anthology of gestures borrowed from videos by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham which are transformed into a hypnotically slow dance. Exhibited in the same room as the painting Magdalene by Francesco Hayez and the prosperous Venus by Pompeo Marchesi, the dancer’s contortions on the floor resemble a moment of bliss.
In This Occupation (2005) a person shares his own experience of life on the fringes of society. A comment about how time can be employed and transformed, This Occupation bears witness to today’s hard times and sketches an empathic portrait of a fragile human being. In Selling Out (2002), art bares all: a dancer mimes a striptease. Presented among the scantily-clad mythological creatures, the all-too-human religious figures, and the gruff peasants of the Villa Reale collection, Selling Out appears as yet another story of seduction between art and its viewers. When seen at a glance, as in the rooms of the Villa Reale collection, art history appears first and foremost as a history of bodies moving through space. Tino Sehgal’s art carries on this tradition, but instead of representing bodies and their desires, he lets us experience them in flesh and blood.
Joyful as a celebration and repetitive as a mysterious ritual, Sehgal’s work is also a reflection on the value and the space assigned to art. Sehgal has chosen to forgo all documentation and reproduction of his pieces, concentrating—like an obsessive exercise in self-discipline—on the uniqueness of art as a direct, physical experience: His work exists as a form of oral tradition, a legend, a tale that must be passed down and can be neither photographed nor illustrated. No documentation or reproduction is allowed, in order to focus all the attention on the physical evidence of his work and on its mythical resonance. As though doubting their own existence, Tino Sehgal’s choreographed situations even produce their own antibodies: in This is Critique (2008), a new piece shown for the first time at Villa Reale, the artist calls himself into question, stimulating an animated discussion with visitors about his own approach.
With the Tino Sehgal exhibition, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi invites the public to explore, for the first time, the living works of art that the German artist has installed for the historic architecture, modern art collections and luxurious decorations of Villa Reale. After the Peter Fischli & David Weiss retrospective at Palazzo Litta, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues its commitment to produce works of today’s most interesting artists for the forgotten monuments of the city of Milan. With its initiatives, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi turns Milan into an endless repertoire of coups de theatre: a nomadic museum, a moveable feast.
Villa Reale is home to Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, housing a collection of 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces by figures such as Antonio Canova, Medardo Rosso, Paul Cézanne, the futurists and many others. The history of the Villa is deeply rooted in Milan’s Napoleonic period.
This sumptuous building still preserves its lavish decorations and priceless original furnishings. In the frescoed and stuccoed halls of the vast villa on Via Palestro, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has invited British-born, German-based artist Tino Sehgal to present a unique, extraordinary selection of his human sculptures. This exhibition brings together the most ambitious and complete overview of his oeuvre to date, including new pieces presented alongside some of Sehgal’s most celebrated works.
Tino Sehgal is one of the most radical artists to emerge in recent years. His work is an art without objects which only exists as a set of gestures and oral instructions carried out by trained interpreters for the entire duration of the exhibition. Sehgal’s work immerses the audience in uncanny situations and intricate compositions executed by dancers, children, extras, museum guards, and art world professionals. Tino Sehgal acts like the director of a complex role-playing game, in which gestures and bodies are used to construct tableaux vivants of surreal beauty.
A visit to a Tino Sehgal exhibition is a sequence of encounters with living sculptures and people in movement, captured in hysterical poses or entwined in sensual embraces. Sehgal’s pieces are choreographies that are continuously executed for the entire duration of the show. For his first major exhibition in Italy, Tino Sehgal auditioned more than 300 men and women of all ages, including actors, dancers, professional singers, and ordinary people with different backgrounds. About 70 people were selected to interpret his work: camouflaged among the guards and the visitors, dozens of interpreters engage the audience in a new theatre of the absurd.
In This is New (2003), the crude reality of everyday life invades the museum setting, enacted by one of the guards who recites the day’s headlines. In This is So Contemporary (2005), as though possessed, other museum guards surround the public and break out into a joyful, unsettling dance. In This is Propaganda (2002), art calls its own power of communication into question: a guard of the museum starts singing a haunting, melancholic song which seems to comment upon Il Quarto Stato (1901) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, one of the most iconic painting in the history of Italian art.
Tino Sehgal’s work entertains a rich dialogue with history, while remaining firmly rooted in contemporary social practices and preoccupations. As part of his exhibitions viewers and actors are invited to exchange views, experiences and other forms of knowledge. Installed within the stucco and the golden framed mirrors of Villa Reale, Sehgal’s choreographies take on a ghostly presence but can also be read as carefully rehearsed conversation pieces of a new rococo.
In Kiss (2002), the bodies of two dancers roll around on the ground and re-enact poses from some of the most famous kisses in the history of art—from Antonio Canova, who happens to be featured in the Villa Reale collection, all the way to Jeff Koons. Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) is an anthology of gestures borrowed from videos by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham which are transformed into a hypnotically slow dance. Exhibited in the same room as the painting Magdalene by Francesco Hayez and the prosperous Venus by Pompeo Marchesi, the dancer’s contortions on the floor resemble a moment of bliss.
In This Occupation (2005) a person shares his own experience of life on the fringes of society. A comment about how time can be employed and transformed, This Occupation bears witness to today’s hard times and sketches an empathic portrait of a fragile human being. In Selling Out (2002), art bares all: a dancer mimes a striptease. Presented among the scantily-clad mythological creatures, the all-too-human religious figures, and the gruff peasants of the Villa Reale collection, Selling Out appears as yet another story of seduction between art and its viewers. When seen at a glance, as in the rooms of the Villa Reale collection, art history appears first and foremost as a history of bodies moving through space. Tino Sehgal’s art carries on this tradition, but instead of representing bodies and their desires, he lets us experience them in flesh and blood.
Joyful as a celebration and repetitive as a mysterious ritual, Sehgal’s work is also a reflection on the value and the space assigned to art. Sehgal has chosen to forgo all documentation and reproduction of his pieces, concentrating—like an obsessive exercise in self-discipline—on the uniqueness of art as a direct, physical experience: His work exists as a form of oral tradition, a legend, a tale that must be passed down and can be neither photographed nor illustrated. No documentation or reproduction is allowed, in order to focus all the attention on the physical evidence of his work and on its mythical resonance. As though doubting their own existence, Tino Sehgal’s choreographed situations even produce their own antibodies: in This is Critique (2008), a new piece shown for the first time at Villa Reale, the artist calls himself into question, stimulating an animated discussion with visitors about his own approach.
With the Tino Sehgal exhibition, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi invites the public to explore, for the first time, the living works of art that the German artist has installed for the historic architecture, modern art collections and luxurious decorations of Villa Reale. After the Peter Fischli & David Weiss retrospective at Palazzo Litta, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues its commitment to produce works of today’s most interesting artists for the forgotten monuments of the city of Milan. With its initiatives, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi turns Milan into an endless repertoire of coups de theatre: a nomadic museum, a moveable feast.