Flashbacks – 3. Marco Andrea Magni

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.
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.

From May 21st to June 4th, 2022, BUILDINGBOX will be hosting two works by Marco Andrea Magni (1975), a Swiss-born artist who featured in the group exhibition Matter, Spaces, Visions presented by BUILDING in 2020.
Presenting elegantly textured surfaces, the soft, subtle color of terracotta patterned by light lines, the works in the exhibition evoke the circularity of time and bear witness to Magni’s investigation of the relationship between form and matter and his experiments with different materials, elements which characterize all of his practice.
Evoking the specular shape of an hourglass, the simple yet hermetic terracotta sculpture Bacio [Kiss] (2020), is designed to arouse the imagination. While we initially feel emotionally drawn to a familiar, everyday object, its altered, duplicated form eliminates its normal function, deconstructing our experience and masterfully – inevitably – projecting us into the aesthetic realm. The concentric lines of Gola [Throat] (2020), a work composed of a filter that the artist has infused with different-colored earths, communicate movement and the same time set a seal of permanence on the matter that dwells in the porous fibers of the fabric.