DAVID TREMLETT. SOMEONE HAS DONE SOMETHING ON THE WALL
Location: AR.CH.IT Luca Cipelletti, Via Pasquale Paoli 8
Open to the public: from Monday, 27 March to Sunday, 9 April from 10am to 6pm By appointment: until Friday, 5 May 2017
Photo credit: Henrik Blomqvist
Luca Cipelletti’s studio AR.CH.IT is specialized from the beginning of its activity in the design of museums, exhibition spaces and displays, of buildings and interiors, in a continuous conversation between art and architecture. A fundamental theme in Cipelletti’s practice, to which he has now decided to dedicate a series of exhibitions organised in collaboration with artists, institutions, collectors and galleries; to be set up in his own spaces.
Recently expanded and renewed, in view of becoming also an exhibition venue, the studio, located in via Pasquale Paoli, a close step far from the Ripa di Porta Ticinese, will host a series of projects aimed at expanding and studying – through a choral dialogue – the themes at the core of the relationship between architecture and art.
The debut of this cycle – its first edition – is a solo show by David Tremlett. The result of over ten years of conversation between the esteemed British artist and Luca Cipelletti, that already originated a series of joint projects. From The Shit Museum in Castelbosco (Piacenza), to the headquarters of the Niasca farm in Portofino, from the requalification of the monumental building of the National Museum of Science and Technology “Leonardo da Vinci” in Milan, to the design of private apartments and public buildings in Milan, Paris, Venice, and Bari.
Coordinated by Massimo Valsecchi, Tremlett’s exhibition is rare and significant. It brings together large- sized historical artworks produced between 1974 and 1991 – some of which have never been exhibited and are of fundamental importance in the definition of his work, plus a new wall drawing, made specifically on this occasion for the walls of AR.CH.IT.
The phrase upon which the exhibition is titled, Someone Has Done Something On The Wall, can be read as: “somebody took a leak on the wall” and refers to the way the artists of the Seventies ironically spoke about their work, their interventions in museums, houses and galleries. About a new, despite archaic, form of painting-sculpture; one which entered, and still enters, in a direct dialogue with the built, shared and collective space. Expanding the idea and practice of design. Of the relationship between art, architecture and decoration.
Via Pasquale Paoli 8 20143 Milano tel +39 02 89407963 studio@ar.ch.it www.ar.ch.it
Pulled out of the artist’s private archive, and previously published in his most important catalogues, Two Curves (1974) and Two from Boulder (1975), two compositions respectively 3 and 4-meter long open the show both ideally and chronologically. Among Tremlett’s first works, they both belong to a series which was recently included in the exhibition Conceptual Art in Britain (2016) at Tate Britain in London, and are exhibited here for the first time. They are followed by a selection of successive works, all of them just as significant. All the crucial steps in the artist’s life. Each of them previously exhibited in important museums such as the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover, the Carre D’Art in Nimes, the Juan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, the Museo Pecci in Prato and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Grenoble. The exhibition is complemented by the preparatory drawings of the two projects of exterior architecture that Tremlett has realized in Italy; the Fondaco in Portofino, in collaboration with Cipelletti, and the recently inaugurated Chiesetta di Coazzolo in Piedmont.
Someone Has Done Something On The Wall, 1974 > 2017, thus, brings into focus the work of one of the most relevant figures of international art of the past forty years, whose work reflects the deepest and most articulated connections between art and architecture. Together with the motives of a common and shared method, marked by profound affinity, with Luca Cipelletti, hence inaugurating in Milan his sequence of conversation-exhibitions.
DAVID TREMLETT’S BIOGRAPHY
A sculptor born in St Austell, Cornwall, in 1945, Tremlett graduated from the Birmingham College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, establishing himself as a key figure in conceptual art in the Seventies. Since the Eighties, most of his works have taken the form of wall drawing and work on paper, made with coloured pastels directly on the different surfaces, producing interventions, permanent or temporary, both in museums and in public and private spaces: the so-called “Cappella del Barolo” chapel in La Morra, in the province of Cuneo in Italy (1999, in collaboration with Sol LeWitt), the British Embassy in Berlin (2000), Palazzo Re Enzo in Bologna (2003), the church of Villenauxe-la-Grande (2005), the Zamosc Synagogue (2006). Tremlett has exhibited internationally in private galleries and public museums such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée des Beaux Arts in Grenoble, the Museo Pecci in Prato, the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, the MoMA in New York. In 2011 he was commissioned by the Tate Britain to make a wall drawing, “Drawing for Free Thinking”, which now dominates with its 450-square metres the museum’s entrance. In 2016 he completed the exterior of the Chiesetta di Coazzolo, in the Piedmont region, in Italy.