GIOVANNI CAMPUS Tempo e passione. A Tribute to the Artist (1929-2025)

From March 26th to May 23rd, 2026, BUILDING GALLERY presents GIOVANNI CAMPUS Tempo e passione. A Tribute to the Artist (1929-2025), an exhibition dedicated to the Maestro, a few months after his passing.
The exhibition, curated by Marco Meneguzzo, grew out of a desire to celebrate and pay tribute to one of the most rigorous and consistent artistic research in the contemporary Italian art scene. Through a selection of the artist’s emblematic artworks—brought together in the exhibition space from the ground floor to the first floor of the gallery—the exhibition conveys the power of an essential language based on the dialogue between time, space, and sign.

As curator Marco Meneguzzo observes: “In recent years, Tempo in processo has been the title of almost all of Giovanni Campus’s artworks, actions, and exhibitions. ‘Tempo in processo’ means considering a universal factor—time—linked to human time, which is not only ‘becoming’ but indeed ‘process’. All his activity as a sculptor revolves around processuality, which is peculiar to the human being because it implies a will to act. Thus, what appear to be silent, minimalist, immanent sculptures always speak of the hands that installed them, which are necessarily not only those of the artist. For Campus, in fact, the sculptor is a catalyst of forces, and sculpture is a collective endeavor. The entire exhibition, set up on the first two floors of BUILDING GALLERY, aims to commemorate and celebrate not only the artist but also an approach to sculpture which, in its fundamental principles, involves teamwork – a collective endeavor – that leads to an awareness of the action and the creative process even before the formal outcome.”

The exhibition aims to serve as a fitting tribute to the artist from Milan, the city that welcomed him in the 1960s and where he lived and worked for over fifty years.
In this context, the exhibition begins on the ground floor with two wall-mounted projections dedicated to photographic documentation of the artist’s most famous actions/interventions. Among these is Intervento.installazione, an action carried out in 1977 in the Piazzetta of Palazzo Reale in Milan, in which, with the help of several students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and in collaboration with the ArteStruktura gallery, he stretched steel springs between the buildings with great force, in the impossible attempt to measure space using an almost unpredictable system of measurement (the spring that extends…).
On the walls, there are works from the 1970s and 1980s from the BUILDING collection—including Segnico continuo (1977), Struttura modulare multipla (1970), and Percorso. Intervento (1983)—while the space is traversed by springs that, echoing the 1977 installation, on the one hand, limit the view of the exhibition space, and, on the other, evoke a dimension of utopian constructive happiness.
The spring, an elementary form achieved through a perceptual variation of the circumference, is placed in the space not only to fill it but to “modulate” it, acting on the environment and establishing a relationship between the exhibition walls.

On the first floor, the exhibition continues in the same spirit with a selection of works from subsequent decades, including several concrete pieces from the 1980s, titled Determinazione, and the famous Tempo in Processo. Rapporti-misure-connessioni (2008–2018).
Despite the apparent formal differences between the concrete works—which resemble rocks of indefinite shapes (evoking the cliffs of the Gallura coast, where in the early 1980s, Campus carried out a series of large-scale measurement interventions), and the multifaceted canvases broken up by iron beam inserts, the principle running through the artist’s entire sculptural practice is that of harmony achieved through knowledge, understood as the measure of the relationship between things.