Andrea Galvani, winner of the prestigious 7th Audemars Piguet Award for the production of a work of art at ARCOmadrid 2019

Presented by the Revolver gallery, Galvani's project explores the frontiers of the unknown and seems to illustrate a new cosmology.

The Italian artist Andrea Galvani has won the 7th Audemars Piguet Award for the production of a work of art at ARCOmadrid 2019. His project, presented by the Peruvian Revolver gallery, will be exhibited in the Audemars Piguet space at the Fair when it is held from 27 February to 3 March.

The jury, comprised of Javier Molins, art critic; Lucía Casani, director of La Casa Encendida; Pilar Lladó, collector; Eduardo Rivero, collector; Eloy Martínez de la Pera, art consultant at Audemars Piguet Iberia; Winka Angelrath, director of exhibitions at Audemars Piguet; Brian Lavio, general director of Audemars Piguet, and Carlos Urroz, director of ARCOmadrid, highlighted how well his entry reflected the spirit of the brand, which based on "Complexity and precision". The scientific basis of the award is combined with the powerful visual and conceptual experience of the Galvani piece, in addition to a performance that will activate the whole facility at certain times during the art fair.With this award, Andrea Galvani will have a prize worth 15,000 euros for the production of his site-specific project.

Developed in collaboration with physicists and mathematicians at UNAM, NASA and the Imperial College of London, the project excavates into the frontiers of the unknown - a living memorial to the temporality of theories and attempts to transform the uncertain into the absolute. The title of the installation, Instruments for Inquiring into the Wind and the Shaking Earth, the name of the first seismoscope invented by visionary mathematician and scholar Zhang Heng (78 -139 CE). According to ancient Chinese records, in the year 138 his primordial device detected an earthquake 600 kilometers away. This work is both a proclamation of the power and failure of human knowledge - our desire to understand, to regulate what is abstract, to impose order and precision upon an unpredictable and complex world.

The installation is an incandescent landscape, a unified visual field conceived as an experiential environment - an act of discovery. Like a cloud, a constellation of white neon calculations suspended overhead occupies the transitional zone of architectural space. Mathematical equations precisely describe the symmetry of physical laws: from the undulating movement of waves, to the nature of time; the generation of a lighting storm, to the regulation of ocean tides; the rate at which the cosmos expands, and the possibility of life on other planets.Vocalists and performers transform the space into an immersive kinetic theater. Live voices produce a chorus that seems to emerge from a primitive instinct. Natural sounds and chants rise, articulating a transformation from state to state in a sonic ecosystem that is alive and active. Like a river that is never the same, bodies and sounds move through a cyclical choreography that advances and recedes. The installation expands, becomes a soundscape, an experimental orchestra of audio-visual stimuli. Collective rhythms and individual inflections move and pulse through space, texturizing it, interacting with architecture, the work, and the public.

Andrea Galvani lives and works in New York and Mexico City.Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach that often draws upon scientific methodology, his conceptual research informs his use of photography, video, drawing, sculpture, sound, architectural installation, and performance.

Galvani has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York; the 4th Moscow Biennial for Contemporary Art; the Mediations Biennial, Poznań, Poland; 9th Biennial of Contemporary Art of Nicaragua; Art in General, New York; Aperture Foundation, New York; The Calder Foundation, New York; Pavilion - Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Bucharest; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento; Macro Museum, Rome; GAMeC, Bergamo; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Sculpture Center, New York; among others. His work is part of major public and private collections in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, including: the Permanent Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Deutsche Bank Collection, London; Artist Pension Trust, New York; the Contemporary Art Society, Aspen Collection, New York; the UniCredit Art Collection, Milan; the Permanent Collection of the United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto; the 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco; and MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome. He was a visiting artist at New York University, and has completed several artist residencies in New York, including Location One International Artist Residency Program, the LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MIA Artist Space Program/Columbia University School of the Arts. In 2011, he received the New York Exposure Prize and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2016, the Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto presented Galvani's first mid-career retrospective in Europe.