Chiara Dynys

CHIARA DYNYS

Edited by Giorgio Verzotti

Allemandi VAF Fondazione Thanks to Book published by Umberto Allemandi Allemandi Emanuela Baccaro Andreas Beitin In collaboration with Gaia Bianchi di Lavagna, Archivio Scala Firenze VAF - Stiftung Roberto Bilotti Michele Bonuomo Editorial coordination Piercarlo Borgogno Serena Ferrari Maria Letizia Cassata Raffaella Caruso Graphics Maria Vittoria Clarelli Emiliano Martino Monica De Cardenas Davide Giauna Giuliana e Stefano De Crescenzo Serena e Daniela Ferrari Texts Marie Laurie Fleisch Andreas Beitin Marco Franciolli Volker W. Feierabend Aurelio Galfetti Daniela Ferrari Stefano Gentile Robert C. Morgan Davide Giauna Giorgio Verzotti Edward Greco Sabine e Kurt Groenewold English translation Rocco Guglielmo David Graham Mahmoud Hamada Marianne ed Eva Hollenbach Giuseppe Lezzi Nicola Loi Annamaria Maggi Emiliano Martino Piero Mascitti Stefano Meloni Werner Meyer Robert Morgan Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati Giuseppina Panza di Biumo Maria Cristina Parravicini Domenico Piraina Giampaolo Prearo Stefano Rastrelli Angelandreina Rorro Maria Saava Norbert Salenbauch Vittorio Sgarbi Mario Soria Olga Strada Daniela e Italo Tomassoni Luca Tommasi Franco e Melissa Valli Giorgio Verzotti Peter Weibel Annalisa Zanni Un ringraziamento speciale a / Special thanks to Volker W. Feierabend Table of Contents

Dr. Klaus Wolbert 4 Preface

Volker W. Feierabend 5 Introduction

Robert C. Morgan 7 Art and Empathy

Giorgio Verzotti 10 Chiara Dynys

Daniela Ferrari 15 A frame of mind

Andreas Beitin 20 Chiara Dynys’s Curtain: Raise the Curtain for a World Divided Between Illusion and Reality

25 Works

305 Filmography

323 Critical anthology

345 Biography

347 Solo and group exhibitions

355 Bibliography

Preface

The VAF Foundation, which is based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is a non-profit culturally active venture whose commitment is focused on supporting, promoting and spreading modern and contemporary Italian art. On this basis, the key activities of the Foundation are mainly aimed at improving knowledge of contemporary Italian art in Germany and in other countries. This passionate and commit- ted initiative is based on an extensive, first-class collection of Italian art, with artworks covering a period of art history from the beginnings of modernism in Italy to current trends, namely, from Futurism to Metaphysical art, but also the Novecento Italiano and early Abstract art. These are just some of the important masterpieces that can be found in the collection, as well as works from all major art movements after 1945. In terms of figures, this means that the VAF Foundation has more than 1,500 Italian works of art dating back to the 20th century, as well as modern day ones, which include paintings and sculptures, but also object art and works of other disciplines. Some of the artworks of the VAF Foundation are on display as a loan in German museums, and an extensive collection is housed at the MART, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto. The Foundation works in partnership with the MART, which is where its administrative and communication headquarters are located. The collection is constantly being added to and expanded through additional purchases. The Foundation is also engaged in other activities, such as subsidising exhibitions, or even developing and organising exhibitions on specific historical or thematic aspects of Italian art, as well as on unique creations by in- dividual artists. In doing so, the Foundation wishes to draw attention to artists who, despite producing high-quality works, have not yet received the attention they need, rather than introducing artists who are already publicised elsewhere. Furthermore, the Foundation publishes its own scholarly publications on art studies and sponsors the work of Italian male and female artists, for example by promoting the creation of catalogues, which also involves the preparation and publication of entire scientific catalogues of works. Every two years, the VAF Foundation also awards a 20,000 euro prize for young Italian art, called the Premio Fondaziuns VAF, which has now become one of the most highly regarded promotional awards in Italy. The preparation steps leading up to the prize awarding process include setting up an exhibition and producing an elaborate catalogue. Following a comprehensive research phase, 15 participants from all regions of Italy are generally selected to take part in the exhibition, among which the prizewinner will be picked by a jury. This exhibition is always held in famous buildings in Italy and Germany, or even in Austria.

Dr. Klaus Wolbert Managing Director of the VAF Foundation

4 Introduction Volker W. Feierabend

I met Chiara Dynys at the end of the 1990s on the occasion of her exhibition at the Galleria Fumagalli in Bergamo and I bought her first works for my collection. Over the following years I kept in touch with her, and the collection was enriched with other works. I had for years been obsessed by the idea of keeping my collection unchanged, also for the future. After long reflection I decided to set up the “Foundation for the promotion of contemporary Italian art” in 2000, which I named the Fondazione Vaf, whose concrete aim, established in its statute, is to promote knowledge of Italian art beyond the borders. A prize for Italian artists is provided for at points five and six of the statute: 5. assignment of a biennial prize set up in 2003, awarded to young Italian artists and titled Agenore Fabbri, of 20,000 euros; 6. organisation of an exhibition as completion of the prize, with the aim of providing the jury with a qualified selection of artists before making their final decision; such exhibition to be held in both Italy and Germany, in different places each year, with the possibility of Austria and German Switzerland becoming partners in the event. Young artists take part in the exhibition set up for this purpose, possibly from all regions of Italy, in the sectors concerned: painting, sculpture, installations, video and photography. The participants are identified and invited by the foundation’s committee by a process of study and selection. The artists’ studios are visited in all parts of Italy, from Alto Adige to Sicily.

The first prize was awarded in 2003.

The members of the administration council and committee were: professor doctor Manfred Fath (director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim), professor doctor Dieter Ronte (director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn); professor Peter Weiermair (director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main); doctor Evelyn Weiss (director of the Museum Ludwig, Köln); doctor Klaus Wolbert (director of the Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt and chairman of the Fondazione Vaf) and the founder. This committee unanimously awarded the art prize to Chiara Dynys. This recognition marked the start of a collaboration and, in the subsequent years, other works were bought for the collection with consequent solo exhibitions organised at Kunstmuseum in Bochum in 2003, at Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2004 and at ZKM, Museum für Neue Kunst, in Karlsruhe in 2009, 2011, 2012.

During these years of shared activity, therefore, I have tried to buy the most important works by Chiara Dynys so as to represent the entire range of her creative production.

5 Art and Empathy Robert C. Morgan

Having reflected on the diversity of works by Chiara Dynys in recent months, I have chosen to ground my re- marks on how I perceive the artist with regard to her ineffable sense of time, space, and empathy. The term “empathy” may hold an ambiguous connotation as to how one person identifies with another without positioning oneself in relation to “the other.” In the process of thinking and making art, one might consider empathy the means by which the artist discovers content that extends beyond the self in relation to another subjective space. This approach became evident in Dynys’ work in the 1990s, specifically in performance installations, such as Bevi Rosmunda (1999) and Limitare i Danni (1998), each involving mixed that included cotton braids, copper pipes, fabrics, and reflectors. Both were presented at Mart, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rov- ereto. The interaction between the forms and materials with the performers and/or participants in these works suggested a kind of open deconstructive space in which the artist alludes to sensory input. As I continue to reflect on this aspect of her work from then until now, my sense of receivership admittedly becomes mediated through various writings and exchanges, both direct and indirect, both in the form of con- versations and telecommunications. More recently, I would consider Dynys’ vast wall projections shown at M77 Gallery as unmistakably related to her month-long experience with the northern lights in the wilderness regions of Lapland as an extension of the earlier works (but also a liberation). Again, these projections revealed her man- ner of dealing with content through a kind of distant subjectivity that becomes increasingly more conscious and accessible over time. In the process, the artist’s work continues to enhance my heightened interest in her astute visual vocabulary, as in her series of inscrutable photographs mounted inside brilliantly polychrome sawtooth frames, seen (at least, for myself) as complementary to intimate space-age galaxies, titled Look Afar (2016) – a coherent exegesis, if there ever was one, which admits her pronounced and remarkable conceptual imagination. From my perspective, her accuracy as a developing artist begins ever earlier with her angular minimal-style works that project from the walls of a room as a series of reliefs. The precision-cut trapezoidal forms, in particular, were shown frequently in Italy and elsewhere between 1990 and 1995, culminating in an important mono- graph curated by Guido Costa (1996). Some may refer to these architectonic modules as an incessant “formal” device, but, in fact, they are more complex. By 1993, the reliefs were moving toward an assembly of scattered boxes of varied sizes, again placed on walls as if they had emanated from different origins and in various sizes. They were constellations that preceded the northern lights and opened the space in preparation for something else to happen, another aspect of her empathy or emphatic desire, as the case may be. I am thinking of the pro- jected lights vibrating on the ceiling derived from ten glass spheres. Titled Please Don’t Cry (2015), each of the glass spheres represents a country currently at war where no easy or predictable resolution on the horizon. Still, nearly two decades prior to this, we begin to see content in her work evolving from the threshold of visualization into a new relevance. Since then, Dynys has been engaged in the process of envisioning the present without en- tirely relinquishing the past, thereby allowing us to enter into the everyday world as an ongoing historical reality. Over the past twenty years, there has been a considerable confluence of work that has entered into the lexicon of Dynys. Some would argue in favor of specific works that seem to move in a forward direction toward a more explicit form of content (or content in form), which, I believe, is one of the important ongoing themes in her current work. Her multi-directional viewpoints are embedded in the work to the extent that they become im-

7 ploded by Dynys as made evident in her performance installations. For the sake of accuracy I would borrow a term from the artist Allan Kaprow, who in the early 1960s identified what he called “environments.” These were altered spaces in which viewers were transformed into participants. Here I refer to a work by Dynys, titled Alti e bassi (1998), in which the earlier open geometric constellations from 1992-93 become closed polychrome cubes and parallelepipeds with an acoustic mechanism that allowed visitors in the space to invoke the pre-recorded sounds of female voices repeating the phrase “Ti amo” (I love you). Alti e bassi is one of the more overt forms of empathy where the visitor’s anonymity in an unknown space is suddenly transgressed. In lieu of alienation, the visitor becomes the subject who is being spoken to, less in terms of information than of feeling. In doing so, the emotional content of the visitor comes into focus as a person, who now stands within a welcoming space making contact with the environment through an acoustical structure at a particular time of day – and, in the process, has become cognizant of being present. I am taken by some of the formidable comments made by Giorgio Verzotti, a critic whose process of thought manages to transform the varied projects and projections of Dynys into a copious and distinct metalanguage. This would suggest that Verzotti has located the timely threshold that the artist has consciously laid bare. Could we then say that this triumvirate of exchange is about the practice of art within the realm of a secular timeliness that roves the spectrum of experience? I believe the discourse involving Dynys is precisely about this condition, which is, after all, a human condition. More to the point, her work has evolved since the 1990s into a form of empathetic cognition, ultimately transforming itself into a spur. This spur opened a new potential that took her beyond the architectonic forms of art previously known into the content of open-ended intentions where her innovative and undaunted artistry was permitted to engage with time, tempi, and temporality, all in one. She was moving from the structuration of the past into a kind of phenomenology where various forms of memory began to take hold. Through the work of Chiara Dynys, empathy comes close to content, which is what we see and how we feel in relation to the other. In the exhibition Simboli e Geometria in Piero della Francesca – Una lettura di Chiara Dynys, shown at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan (2013), our willingness to enter into an experience with this installation begets a resonance that could occur only at one time and one place. The profound sensation of witnessing Dynys’ reflective geometry in relation to Piero’s San Nicola da Tolentino (1469) may at first seem unfathomable until one gets a grip on the austere nature of its meaning. This painting was a fundamental element in the com- mission given to Piero for the Augustinian church of Borgo Sansepolcro. Through Dynys’ interest both in the painting and mathematics of Piero, she created an installation based on the inclusion of non-objective forms suggested by the painting, thereby providing an updated context for San Nicola da Tolentino . Here, with this painting, we find the diligence and acute intelligence of Chiara Dynys working through the mathematical ren- derings found in Piero’s polytych, while, at the same time, giving this precise geometry an unremitting renewal, thus revealing that art remains capable of transforming reality through actions and placements of sheer defiance, an obverse sensibility that moves toward unraveling the stalemate of power falsely given to art through the force of embedded memory employed by the artist. The question or questioning of the past in relation to the present appears an ongoing concern in Dynys’ world. As with many artists, she has indulged herself with self-referencing in relation to the larger issues somewhere between form and content, time and space, recognizing that these are not calculable extremes. For Dynys, the geometric and architectonic concerns in her work have been present since the beginning. But then came a moment when she profoundly understood the need to take a departure from the self-referencing of form, to break free from the predictable aspects of identity that too often come into a kind of unnecessary, often inhibited style of repetition. I am reasonably convinced that by the late 1990s, moving into the twenty-first century, Dynys saw herself more in terms of liberation than repetition. Suddenly the notion of repetition and identity transformed into a kind of flotation or, better put, a Freudian sublimation whereby the inner-conflict suddenly became a

8 compelling impetus. This was the moment when Dynys became endowed with poetry of instinct and gave way to empathy. As an artist, she was ready to go beyond herself, which is another way of saying she could project her work and the content of her ideas into unknown spaces – the extremities of the northern lights – without any need of ulterior verification, none at all. Finally, I would like to cite a work by Dynys from 2010 made with painted steel and blue neon, titled Doppio Sog- no. The work was realized for the Collection Terna Energia in Rome, which would seem an appropriate match. To observe Doppio Sogno effectively, the viewer is asked to look up at the ceiling where a spiral in blue light reads: Più luce su tutto (More light on everything). According to the artist, this particular spiral represents the invisible trace of DNA molecules, a structure that resides in every human body. Indeed, there are many spiral formations that exist throughout nature, including the extraordinary nautilus shell containing the essence of the Fibonacci series. The point of this work is not to limit our perceptions to a single reference, but instead to open the possi- bilities of how we think, feel, and act as human beings in relation to one another. The spiral connections within the visible universe suggest that we reside on a relatively small planet. As a human species, it would appear on a microscopic level we somehow belong to one another. This is the pervasive message I have retrieved from being in the presence of such vital and provocative work, the art of Chiara Dynys.

Bevi Rosmunda Più luce su tutto