Room 1: Gianfranco Baruchello and Elisabetta Benassi

In this room, Gianfranco Baruchello and Elisabetta Benassi will deal with the tension between fragment and system in which the human desire to archive and classify things clashes with impossibility and the failure to do so.    

1. About the Artist: Gianfranco Baruchello

Gianfranco Baruchello has created works in varying mediums throughout his career, expressing his belief that anything can be art, from a running farm to a pair of cutoff shorts. A close friend of Marcel Duchamp, Baruchello took his artistic philosophy close to heart: “Duchamp gives authorization to do whatever you want, anything at all, just so long as you really like it, just so long as it really makes sense to you,” he once said. Read more.

Images: Giftpflanzen, Gefahr, 2009, Courtesy: Fondazione Baruchello, Rome; La bonne soupe, 1978; Destinato a sputare negli occhi del sultano turco in persona, 1974; Déserteur de la légion, 1974, Courtesy: Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin-Singapore; Portrait: Gianfranco Baruchello; Piccolo sistema, 2012 – 2013, Photo: Roberto Galasso

2. About the Artist: Elisabetta Benassi

Conceptual artist Elisabetta Benassi draws upon historic and personal archives as the foundation for her practice, all the while questioning their particular representations of facts. One of her best known series of watercolors, “All I Remember” (2011), features original journalistic photographs of explosions in the 20th century; these are presented as enlarged watercolors of the photographs’ backs, including notes and inscriptions. Read more.

Images: Obscured by Clouds, 2009, Courtesy: the artist and Magazzino Rome; Portrait: Elisabetta Benassi; The Dry Salvages, 2013, Courtesy l’artista e Magazzino, Roma, Photo: Roberto Galasso