Gagliardi and Domke presents:
#MartinaBrugnara – Alloggiamenti

September 20, 2018 – October 26, 2018
Via Cervino 16
10155 Turin

4.10.18, 6.00 pm, aperitif with the artist at the gallery.

On the occasion of the resumption of autumn activities and the beginning of the 2018-2019 season, the gallery in via Cervino 16 presents the third solo exhibition of the young artist Martina Brugnara. After “Congerie” in 2016 and “Fred” presented in 2017, Martina will present “Alloggiamenti” on the upper floor of the gallery on the 20th September.

In the last year Marina (25) has been observed with interest by some prestigious institutions and awards, emerging to the point of winning an exhibition in Italy at Mart and in Germany at Stadtgalerie Kiel.
In in the previous two solo shows in Turin Martina showed herself as a Millennial artist and as such her work was pervaded by a practice of Circular Economics (her rituals of the Elsener family were assemblies of tools collected with rhabdomite skills by Martina in scattered cottages, and brought back to new and lasting life by the filter of the imagination), also in this last exhibition, the practice that moves marketing to reward size impression by magnifying the blisters and containers of each object – and therefore also of the tools – is put under critical observation by Martina. Her instruments, crossed by time and therefore unusable, disappear here and nothing remains of them other than a trace in a redundant, rigorous and evocative safe custody.

Speaking of her latest work, the artist says:

“The analysis of the object is one of the cornerstones of my research, after having explored its potential through the creation of an active nihilistic process, in which the moment of destruction was overwritten by the need to create something that had a new identity, my attention has shifted to the production of the same.

The reproduction, in the modern conception, is a common act that tends to give life to a huge quantity of identical objects and very often designed for an extremely limited use in time, the uniqueness understood as a combination of a historical context and a testimony of use, is thus missing, disrupted by a process of standardization in which the study of the object, is the prerogative of only a limited circle of goods.

The common object loses its aura, meeting the need of a society that, as Walter Benjamin wrote, needs an approach, both spatial and human, with it. The product of these choices creates a lack that very often is not noticed, a deprivation that I think should be highlighted, a neutral light that wants to create in the viewer the need to address this issue.

My activity is inextricably linked to the contact with matter and the need to shape it in what is the product of my research, to do this I need a series of tools that are both mental and physical. The tool is therefore the physical means thanks to which I am able to work, an extension of the body that elevates and specializes it, making it able to perform unrealizable actions.

It is therefore clear that in the analysis of the object my attention has been focused on the tools, already the foundation of the soul of Karl, from these premises these new shells are born, ideally tool houses, which through their spatiality become bases that show through special housings the lack of the tool, the location prepared for placement in fact will be deprived of its main function, becoming the content and no longer the container.

The failure to insert the tools is the very core of the work, starting from the need to house an instrument in the most optimal way, building a custom-made case for it makes the deprivation clear that I put in place, the action that is necessary to show the loss that the reproduction imposes on the object. What is really missing is not the object itself but its history, whether or not to show the product of a standardization is equivalent to not showing anything, as it can’t be derived from the aura, the context in which it was designed and the testimony of an experience, of usury.

#MartinaBrugnara