CHRISTIAN FROSI . LA STANZA VUOTA
GAMeC, Bergamo June 10 - September 25, 2022
Ten years after withdrawing from the art world, from June 10, 2022, GAMeC in Bergamo focuses on Christian Frosi (Milan, 1973) with the solo show “La Stanza Vuota”, curated by Nicola Ricciardi. On the occasion of this first museum exhibition of his work after so many years, GAMeC has brought together over 30 works to display, produced in a little over ten years of activity, describing the sense of transience: a constant element in his artistic production. The exhibition path includes works that have become iconic, such as the cloud of foam produced for his first solo show in Milan (Foam, 2003) and other lesser known works, all articulated according to principles of precariousness, fleetingness, and evanescence, which also characterized the artist’s early career. The start of Frosi’s career is easily documentable and coincides with the conclusion of his studies at Brera in 1999, while since 2012, his professional development has been ever less traceable. In that year, although in no precise moment, Christian Frosi ceased to be an artist: he chose not to produce, not to participate, to subtract himself from the history of art, the art scene and its players. Frosi slowly but surely made himself unreachable, cutting off all communication with the art world, for no obvious reason joining the ranks of the dropouts, of those who, in Alexander Koch’s definition, “at given moment X were locatable in the field of art, and at moment Y, later in time, were no longer so.” Frosi’s moment X coincides with numerous solo exhibitions both in Italy and abroad and with his participation in some of the collective exhibitions that have come to define the Italian artists of his generation: from the first Turin Triennial, curated by Francesco Bonami and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2005), to Sindrome Italiana, la jeune création artistique italienne at the Magasin - Centre National d’Art contemporain in Grenoble (2010), to Fuoriclasse, the exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan curated by Luca Cerizza and dedicated to the students of Alberto Garutti. His moment Y, however, coincides with the present day. The decision to focus on Frosi after almost ten years of silence and inaccessibility, stems first of all from the need to remember, protect and preserve his work so that we can continue to observe, contextualize, and perhaps better understand the artist. The second reason lies in the will to interpret his invisibility in the light of an artistic and social present in which one is called upon to always be there, in which silence is an increasingly impervious and rare choice. Observing these practices helps us to understand the countless nuances that disappearance and emptiness may take on in art, which in the case of Christian Frosi find compensation in his enigmatic and transient production, capable of dominating the Italian scene for ten years and which is now presented at GAMeC. La Stanza Vuota is accompanied by a publication, published by Lenz Press and GAMeC, bringing together the work of Cristian Frosi with the human and artistic vicissitudes of other famous dropouts over the last 50 years: from Marcel Duchamp to Agnes Martin, and from Lee Lozano to Charlotte Posenenske. ▲ mostra comprende lavori diventati iconici, come la nuvola di schiuma prodotta per la prima personale a Milano (“Foam”, 2003), e altri meno conosciuti, tutti costruiti attorno a principi di precarietà, fuggevolezza, evanescenza, che ritroviamo anche nella carriera dell’artista. Frosi ha utilizzato diversi materiali e tecniche per creare installazioni, sculture, video, lavori sonori, rifacendosi al luogo e alle caratteristiche degli spazi in cui doveva agire, e proprio questa sua caratteristica lo collega idealmente all’artista protagonista di un’altra mostra di GaMeC ospitata a Palazzo della Ragione, quella di Anri Sala.
“La Stanza Vuota” si completa di una pubblicazione, edita da Lenz Press e GAMeC, che inquadra il lavoro di Christian Frosi in relazione alle vicende umane e artistiche di altri celebri dropout (coloro che, nella definizione di Alexander Koch: “In un determinato momento X sono stati localizzabili nel campo dell’arte e in un momento Y, successivo nel tempo, non lo sono stati più”) degli ultimi cinquant’anni: da Marcel Duchamp ad Agnes Martin, da Lee Lozano a Charlotte Posenenske. ▲