Flashbacks – 2. Roman Opałka

BUILDINGBOX presents, from April 9th, 2022 to January 7th, 2023, Flashbacks, an exhibition curated by Alice Montanini that retraces the most important stages of BUILDING’s artistic research and promotion, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of its birth.
Flashbacks pays tribute to all the artists, curators and essayists who have contributed to shaping BUILDING’s core, presenting for the first time in an organic way a selection of works from the gallery’s permanent collection, accompanied by the catalogues and archive materials that document its curatorial practice over the last five years.

The second chapter, from April 28th, 2022 to May 21st, 2022, presents three works by the French/Polish artist Roman Opałka (Hocquincourt, France, 1931 – Chieti, 2011), already exhibited at BUILDING in 2019 on the occasion of the exhibition Dire il tempo (Telling Time) curated by Chiara Bertola, an exhibition project in two chapters organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.

The artist’s systematic investigation of the inexorable flow of time is represented here in three works belonging to his Self-Portraits series, a project he began working on in 1972. These photographs, taken at the end of each day after completing his daily session of work on 1965 / 1-∞, record the effects of time’s passing on the artist’s body: his face itself becomes the medium of the artwork. The gradual but increasingly profound transformation of Opałka’s features testifies to the irreversible flow of life, whose ineluctable movement toward death, dissolution and the intangibility of the infinite, he accepts as an inevitable condition not only of his existence, but also all his work.

Central to Flashbacks’ investigation is the moment of the exhibition, here conceived as a medium, mirroring the relationships and dynamics generated between the work, the artist and the gallery space, which flow into the more complex sphere of that system of critical and aesthetic categories that are at the basis of BUILDING’s curatorial approach and programming.
An important focus of Flashbacks is also the catalogues published by BUILDING to accompany each exhibition. BUILDING’s strong focus on study and research, not only as a hub for the promotion of contemporary art but also as a publishing house, is evinced by the careful selection of essayists and texts included in the various publications.

The exhibition will provide an opportunity to think back to the highlights of BUILDING’s curatorial activity, while also looking ahead to the future of its programming. To look back at the recent past with gratitude to all those who have accompanied BUILDING to date, but also with a critical eye, in order to outline new coordinates with which to question the present and better orientate ourselves towards the future.

An open-door reinterpretation of its collection, through some representative works by the main artists promoted by the gallery, and of the curatorial and publishing activity carried out so far, presented in the spaces of BUILDINGBOX at irregular intervals and visible 24/7 from the window of via Monte di Pietà 23 in Milan.