Giulia Marchi at Matèria – Artforum International
Pure mild floods Matèria’s ethereal new premises, enhancing the zenlike tranquillity elicited by Giulia Marchi’s “Una pietra sopra,” a sublime exhibition of latest work with a retrospective really feel: The sculptures, installations, and works on paper borrow their titles from the artists, writers, or poets who’ve been key to this conceptualist’s observe, and the objects on show often reprise parts and supplies from her earlier pictures.
Lengthy, virtually translucent scrolls of white Xuan paper of various sizes are pinned to a central pillar, some unfurling to the ground, in Quaranta righe più due metri cubi di aria (Forty strains plus two cubic metres of air, all works 2022). The title, handwritten onto one of many sheets and straightforward to overlook, references avant-garde author Giorgio Manganelli’s definition of a novel. On the opposite aspect of the pillar, flanked by two arches, stands L’infinibilità e’ rigorosamente monocroma (Infiniteness is rigorously monochrome), a tall column of uncooked sheep wool encased in plexiglass (its title cites Piero Manzoni) and a nod to the artist’s 2013 extra colourful “Multiforms” sequence.
Marchi’s deconstructed classicism finds its stunning apogee in Ci sono ferite che per cicatrizzarsi hanno bisogno di altre ferit (There are wounds that want different wounds to heal), a Michelangelo-quoting work whose sheets of roughly hewn marble in grey, pink, yellow, inexperienced, and black have been gently stacked towards a wall. Their edges are laced in gold-leaf, recalling the Japanese observe of Kintsugi, which valorizes scars as a part of one’s previous. Likewise, Marchi’s unassuming works right here intimately hint the histories of their maker, mending fragments right into a delicate and transfixing entire.
— Ana Vukadin
