INCIPIT. Alberto Garutti

C+N Gallery CANEPANERI is pleased to announce INCIPIT, an exhibition dedicated to Alberto Garutti, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. Thanks to the collaboration with Studio Alberto Garutti, the exhibition presents a selection of works accompanied – for the first time since the artist’s passing – by groups of fragments and archival materials, selected to restore form and context to one of the seminal works in Garutti’s career: “Opera per camera da letto: dedicato a chi dorme” [Bedroom work: dedicated to those who sleep]. Conceived in 1995 for room 402 of the Palace Hotel in Bologna, as part of the widespread exhibition Italian Territory – a pioneering and radical project envisioned and curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio between 1993 and 1996 – the work is one of Garutti’s first to be conceived for a non-institutional space.

“Opera per camera da letto: dedicato a chi dorme” [Bedroom work: dedicated to those who sleep] (1995) represents a transformative moment, a crucial turning point in Garutti’s path toward public art and a new reading of the dynamic relationship between artwork and viewer that would shape his artistic life. In the small room of the Palace Hotel, the artist stages a physical metaphor for an encounter by installing a simple pane of glass, painted on the reverse with phosphorescent paint. “Intimate and secretive, the encounter between the work and the viewer takes place at night. The work is ambiguous and transient. It appears in an icy glow at the crossing point between wakefulness and sleep. It is only visible to those who spend the night there. In the hotel room – which is both a public and domestic place at the same time – the work becomes a metaphor for art itself. This work […] is for me a manifesto of intent.” [Alberto Garutti, “Spectator,” in Studio Celant (ed.), Alberto Garutti (Milan / Berlin: a+mbookstore / Hatje Cantz] With the Bologna project in the early 1990s, Garutti began to place, with renewed awareness, the critical responsibility of the viewer’s gaze at the center of his work – a theme that would later take shape in two other series also present in the exhibition at C+N Gallery CANEPANERI: the caption-artwork “Opera dedicata a chi ora alza gli occhi e guarda” [Work dedicated to those who, now, rise their gaze and look] (2015–2016), and above all “Che cosa succede nelle stanze quando le persone se ne vanno?” [What happens in rooms when the people have left?] (2001–2023), a work in which phosphorescent paint – used for the first time in “Italian Territory” – begins to cover various fragments of domesticity: tables, chairs, vases, objects. Garutti recounts: “The public will only see them as ordinary items of furniture. I wanted to alter the public’s perception of the work: it can only be imagined, thought of, awaited. It is in this immaterial tension that the work is disclosed, fulfilled only in the meeting with its spectators, who are asked to make a patient effort to look for it.” [Alberto Garutti in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Domus, no. 901 (March 2007)]