Back In the Saddle
by Fabrizio Mifsud Soler.
To celebrate Bergamo Brescia Italian Capital of Culture, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo has invited British artist Rachel Whiteread to present a site specific installation conceived in relation to the city of Bergamo and in conversation with the architecture and history of Palazzo della Ragione.
Rachel Whiteread’s works explore the imprints of human life on the objects and environments that define daily existence. In her sculptures, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces are transformed into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through casting, Whiteread makes visible those things that ordinarily go unseen. She frees her subject matter from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory. Ever fascinated by those spaces that form part of daily lives yet are so often overlooked, at Palazzo della Ragione, Rachel Whiteread has proposed an installation made up of sixty chairs, constituting a materialisation of the empty space between the legs of two different chair models.
The sculptures are produced using various types of stone found in the building materials of both Palazzo della Ragione and Piazza Vecchia, such as the Sarnico stone in the façade of the Palazzo and the Zandobbio marble in the Contarini Fountain, both of which are still extracted from quarries near Bergamo today. In this way, the artist establishes a close relationship with the territory and its history, as well as with the architecture of the venue hosting her work.
The sixty sculptures that make up the installation evoke both the presence and the absence of people. As in many of her previous works in fact, the emptiness that is filled in these sculptures “is there in place of something else”: in this specific case, of a person or a multitude of people. The arrangement devised by the artist refers to the requirement of social distancing: the chairs are placed in a grid two metres apart, emphasising a silent dimension and void which, while accessible, is still disorienting in its presence.
The installation is also designed to shed light on the history of Palazzo della Ragione, which once constituted a meeting place where representatives of the municipality would meet to discuss, debate, and legislate. The sixty chairs ultimately offer an invitation to visitors to pause and bring to life the Sala, experiencing it as a place of exchange and relationship, of closeness and sharing.
Rachel Whiteread …And the Animals Were Sold, curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Sara Fumagalli at Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo is open until 29th October 2023.
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Images: Lorenzo Palmieri courtesy of GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
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