The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi celebrates the 100th anniversary of the historical fashion house with a contemporary art exhibition at Florence’s Stazione Leopolda.
Text by Anna Battista
The number “8 ½” conjures up in the minds of most Italians visions of a tortured Marcello Mastroianni starring as Guido in Fellini’s eponymous film. For Trussardi, though, it evokes a universe of dreams, obsessions and fantasies strongly connected with contemporary works of art. This is essentially the main reason why the historical Italian fashion house decided to start the celebrations for its 100th anniversary (it was founded in 1911 by Dante Trussardi) with a retrospective art exhibition that opened yesterday in Florence, coinciding with the first day of the Pitti trade fair.
The exhibition features works and installations commissioned to thirteen international artists by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a sort of nomadic museum that organises art events in unconventional buildings, forgotten edifices and public landmarks. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and taking place at Florence’s first railway station, the Stazione Leopolda, Trussardi’s “8 1/2” opens right on the doorstep of the building with Martin Creed’s huge, reassuring and ironic neon sign spelling “Everything Is Going to Be Alright” (2006), stretching across the facade.
Once inside, visitors step into a surreal and at times disturbing world: Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s “Short Cut” (2003), featuring a white Fiat Uno car with a trailer emerging from the floor as if they were just on their way back from a trip to the centre of the Earth, re-explores and redefines physical and mental spaces; Pawel Althamer’s “Balloon” (1999-2007), a grotesque 20 metre-long balloon portraying a man and used as a comment to the overblown ego of many artists, embodies the dream of this Polish artist of looking at the earth from above; memory and melancholy mix instead in Darren Almond’s “If I Had” (2003) conceived as a visual journey inspired by the artist’s grandmother.
Visitors are also plunged into a surreal, absurd and disturbing world through Paola Pivi’s digitally manipulated images, John Boch’s film “Meechfieber” (Milk Fever, 2004), that transforms into a grotesque and horror vision ordinary life at the farm in Gribbohm where the artist was born and where he grew up, and Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s “Parts of a Film with Rat and Bear” (2008), a rather outlandish saga in which the two artists dressed as a bear and a rat explore the spaces at Milan’s Palazzo Litta.
Contemplation is analysed in Tacita Dean’s films shot in the studio of Bolognese painter Giorgio Morandi; enchantment is instead introduced via Urs Fischer’s “House of Bread” (2004), a life-sized structure of bread, wood and polyurethane foam, that, being mainly built with loaves, rolls and baguettes, constantly changes shape and form. Among the strongest works featured there are Anri Sala’s film “Long Sorrow” (2005), analysing alienation via music and architecture and showing a man hanging in mid-air outside the top-floor window of a depressing building on the outskirts of Berlin; Paul McCarthy’s irreverent silicone statue “Static (Pink, 2004-2009)”, showing George W. Bush in an orgy with pigs in a style that vaguely recalls Dieter Roth’s, and Maurizio Cattelan’s “We” (2010), an ironic reflection on death, existence and fear portraying two identical men with the face of the artist lying on a death bed, but with their eyes open and staring at the visitors.
Fellini’s 8 ½ closed with a dreamy scene in which all the film characters held hands and danced in a circus-like atmosphere. In a way, Trussardi’s “8 ½” does the same leaving visitors with a final question: like Guido’s vision at the end of Fellini’s film, is art maybe just another forced fantasy, a hopeful dream or maybe a state of permanent hallucination?
“8 1/2” is at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence, Italy, until 6th February 2011.
