Good morning! Welcome to Artissima 2024. This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to tour number 4 entitled The thousand faces of sculpture and dedicated to the state of international painting. Sculpture commonly refers to the art of shaping an object from a raw material or by assembling different materials together, but also to the final product, namely any three-dimensional object obtained with a specific artistic function. Sculpture has always been a protagonist in the history of art. Just think of Greek-Roman statuary, a symbol of anatomical and moral perfection, so glorified over the centuries by literature as to be defined as "classical", thus an unquestionable yardstick for comparison with all other art forms. Precisely because of its being an undisputed model of the values of ancient art addressed to modern generations, a significant part of the history of Western sculpture can be summed up in a succession of departures from and rediscoveries of classical naturalism (always to be contextualised with gradually different meanings and contours). Well-known are the neo-Platonic considerations of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the undisputed master of the Renaissance, on sculpture as the technique he favoured for the possibility of releasing form from raw material; but also the precise words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, theorist of Neoclassicism, who towards the end of the 18th century praised Greek statuary as the indisputable foundation of an art that should respond to the canons of "noble simplicity" and "quiet grandeur". The gradual break from this vicious circle began in the 19th century, a century dominated by broader eclecticism and technological progress, which even in the field of art introduced new materials alongside the more traditional ones. Then we reach the 20th century with the spread of the Avant-gardes and the Informal, the total questioning of all previous technical, aesthetic and verisimilitude constraints with the represented subject. The intention of this short tour is to offer the opportunity to investigate the many transformations and infinite contemporary variables of sculpture, which today is still open to continuous recodification and new interpretations. The audioguides were developed for Artissima by the mediators of Arteco. This tour was curated by Martina Furno. We are ready to go. Pause your player and head for the Albion Jeune gallery located at number 8 in the New Entries section along the fuchsia corridor, where we will begin our tour. Press play once you are there.

We begin our tour with the Albion Jeune gallery in London, which is participating in Artissima in the New Entries section with works by Serbian artist Ivana Bašić. Ivana Bašić, born in 1986 in Belgrade and now working in New York, addresses in her works the themes of vulnerability and transformation of the human body, channelling personal vicissitudes and traumas into them, many of which can be attributed to her youth spent in Serbia during the breakup of Yugoslavia. The artist herself states that it is necessary for her to completely identify with the materials she chooses to use, so that she can better express what a wounded body really is, as if her work were a direct translation of her fears and pain, which are also the fears and pain of us all. Her sculptures are made of carefully chosen materials that have narrative properties: wax, glass, steel and alabaster. Made in human scale, they have hybrid poses and appearances, organic and mechanical at the same time, while maintaining the natural connotations of flesh and bone in the choice of colours such as pink and white. The result is to have in front of us figures that are unable to function without metal prostheses, which lead the viewer almost to step back, demarcating a boundary between us and the object. Through her sculptures Bašić intends to negotiate the mechanisms of becoming, speculating on post-human scenarios beyond death. The work process is extremely complex: each work stems from a period of intense research, including historical and philosophical studies, religious mysticism, engineering and kinetic processes. All pieces are made so that the various elements fit together perfectly, erasing all traces of her intervention. This perfect fusion of materials requires a great deal of engineering, which makes it time-consuming and laborious, so much so that a single sculpture can take months or even years to produce. This is precisely the paradox she is trying to communicate: to deploy materials that are resistant to time and becoming, yet still very fragile, in order to glimpse flesh in stone as a real act of transformation of matter and as the only alternative to physical escape. «I am trying to think about what it means to return to formlessness and to be freed from the constraints of this material world...» - she says - «Could it be that the disappearance and disintegration of the body is not just a loss, but a form of hope?» We have finished our first stage. Pause your player and head for the Barbati gallery in the Main Section at number 13 on the fuchsia corridor. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

We now find ourselves in front of the Barbati Gallery in Venice in the Main Section, where Agata Ingarden's work is offered to the public. Polish artist Agata Ingarden's practice is directed towards investigations in the field of post-humanities, science fiction and mythical narratives. She works with multiple media including installation, sculpture and video and her works, often a fusion of industrial elements and organic matter, invite viewers to contemplate the ambiguous relationship between nature and technology in the contemporary world, evoking visions of a post-apocalyptic future or one dominated by the forces of the Anthropocene. For the viewer of her sculptures, it is essential to activate the imagination, which allows one to speculate on possible future scenarios. Her visual vocabulary is, in fact, surprising because - in an almost surrealist randomness - she creates unexpected connections, without, however, renouncing that sense of familiarity that harks back to ancient cultures and techniques. The artist states in a recent interview: «What interests me is where the “self” meets "the “other”. The abject. The question of the coexistence of the elements. How we construct and understand the relationships between us, nature and technology, which are like extensions of our bodies. When a personal story becomes collective consciousness». The sculpture on display at the fair is a tangible example of this. Recovering some fabrics and clothes she designed for the 4 rooms performance, she creates a hybrid figure reminiscent of a moth, which flies home and rests on the bed. The word "home" is enclosed in the form of a luminous inscription inside, while the word "empathy" returns several times printed on the sheet. Everything is related, everything is connected, as is also emphasised by the abundant use of copper within the structure, a conductive material par excellence. If we get closer, we notice a strange movement: the insect follows us with its eyes, spying on us. Two home security cameras are connected to the copper cables and record in real time on an app what is happening around them. These kinds of assemblages, placed in relation to different spaces and contexts, generate in the observer a sense of vertigo, which confuses all awareness and shatters all our previous belief systems. This is where our second stage ends. Pause your player and head for the Gandy Gallery, in the Back to the Future section at number 7 along the purple corridor. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

We are now in the curated Back To The Future section in front of the Gandy Gallery in Bratislava, which presents the work of artist Ingeborg Lüscher. Ingeborg Lüscher, a German artist born in 1936, initially trained as an actress. In 1967, she moved to Ticino and got to know the dissidents of the Prague Spring and began to question her own choices. She decided to devote herself to the visual arts and settled in Hans Arp's former studio in Locarno, where he came into contact with the artists of Nouveau Réalisme. The artist's output ranges from photography to painting and sculpture, radiating a unique radical biographical honesty, combined with a joie de vivre. One of the recurring themes, well exemplified by the sulphur sculptures at the exhibition, is the interaction between light and darkness, understood as independent and opposing forces. «I have always been interested in the theme of fire, told through its beginning, sulphur, and its end, ash. And since the sulphur surface illuminates the works, I am interested in investigating what is behind the light,» says Lüscher, who has visited sulphur mines and studied this chemical element at length, also from a symbolic and spiritual point of view. Sulphur dust has been part of her practice since 1984, when she used it in painting by combining it with ash and black acrylic paint, struck by the contrasts of light that these materials generated next to each other. In 1987 he began the series of small sculptures in geometric or natural shapes that we see on display, made from blocks of wood, metal or cardboard coated with plaster and wood flour and dusted with sulphur. Yellow and black are the dominant colours, once again recalling the tireless struggle between light and darkness, between life and death. This is where our third stage ends. Pause your player and head for the Martin Kudlek gallery in the Drawings section at number 4 on the white corridor. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

We are in the curated Drawings section, opposite the Martin Kudlek gallery in Cologne, which presents a selection of works by Oscar Holweck. Although we are in a section devoted to drawing technique, we immediately realise how the works of the German Oskar Holweck, born in 1924 and who died in 2007, are able to fascinate with their timeless, sculptural qualities. As the artist himself stated: «My main goal is to extract intrinsic shapes from a material and make the effect of light visible on surfaces, in empty spaces and similar to the properties of the material itself». Holweck is considered the pioneer of experimentation on paper, which he used as a medium throughout his life and on which he based his entire production. While in his early works with ink and graphite he still used it in the more traditional sense, namely as a support material, from 1958 he began to experiment with its infinite possibilities, producing his first reliefs and making it a sculptural material in which the phenomena of light and shadow, space and time manifested themselves. He used sheets of industrial white paper, which he worked with a method he described in this way: «When working with paper, this means folding, folding, crumpling, folding, pressing, squeezing, compressing, stretching, carving, perforating, tearing, cutting, cutting, gluing, beating, beating, drilling, sawing, burning, heating, burning». The practice is spontaneous in its action, but strongly planned and studied in its objectives. To create this repertoire of visual and physical elements, Holweck created his own tools and invented a kind of "visual grammar" based on sequences, rhythms, density, spacing. It is in seriality that his tenacity and discipline manifest themselves. The colour white, as understood by the artists of the Zero group to which he belonged, was not only considered the emblem of dematerialisation and experiences of the human condition, but also the ultimate representation of the concept of light and the ideal terrain for chiaroscuro research. The work is precisely recorded, so that its evolution can be followed step by step: the artist meticulously dates each work in pencil, in stark contrast to the rough wounds on the paper. We have finished our fourth stage. Pause your player and head for the LABS gallery in the Monologue/Dialogue section at number 12 on the grey corridor. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

We have almost reached the end of our tour, which we conclude in front of the works by Cécile Beau and Charlotte Charbonnel offered by the LABS gallery in Bologna in the Monologue/Dialogue section. The gallery proposes a dialogue between two Parisian artists, Cécile Beau (born in 1978) and Charlotte Charbonnel (born in 1980), whose works investigate the relationship between people and their environment and find a point of agreement in the observation of nature and the cosmos. Their works fuse art and science, revealing how the alteration of matter is not just a physical phenomenon, but can become the bearer of a deeper energy, capable of guiding us in our understanding of ourselves and of contemporaneity. The artists give life to real micro-ecosystems (living, extinct or imaginary) by intervening on various types of materials: the addition of sound elements also allows the viewers to immerse themselves in these environments and perceive their incessant transformation. Cécile Beau combines plants and minerals with illusionistic machinery, creating sound and light sculptures that give life to "slow science fiction" landscapes, where it is the gap between reality and fiction that generates the poetry and shifts space and time. The 2017 Accrétion series consists of hemispheres made of a mixture of cement, sand, earth and pigments. This choice evokes the most humble masonry technique and rehabilitates the original role of the artist as a craftsman, that is, one capable of revealing unknown worlds and interrogating reality. The 2018 work Aoriste , on the other hand, consists of a basaltic rock lying on the ground on which mosses grow. Hidden inside is a hearing equipment that reproduces a double sound: that of an earthquake alternating with the muffled breathing of a panther. With this particular sculpture, the mineral kingdom interacts with the plant and animal kingdoms, giving rise to a hybrid being. Charlotte Charbonnel's work also captures material or natural phenomena, exploring different states of matter. Examples are Asterisme, a 2014 work that consists of blown glass domes inside which the sound of the stars of the Lyra constellation indexed by NASA is reproduced, or the Concretios series from the same year, where salt crystals are grown on strings of various sizes and meshes and where their choice determines the crystal structure and the degree of crystal diffraction. In the Molybdomancies series, made between 2018 and 2022, Charbonnel instead attempts to "freeze" metallic matter in its melted state, playing with the immutable laws of physics and drawing on ancient divinatory traditions. We finished our fifth and final stage. We hope that this tour has stimulated and intrigued you. If you want another perspective on the fair, go back to the info point or the AudioGuides landing page and select another podcast! See you soon and enjoy Artissima!