In 1996, at Casa Masaccio in San Giovanni Val D’Arno in Tuscany, Alberto Garutti created a series of light bulbs that turned on and off as the people living in the spaces adjacent to the room where the work was positioned passed by. The idea was to succeed in interacting with the exterior, with the “outside”, which, through the light bulbs turning on, enters a dialogue and becomes an essential, albeit invisible part of the work itself. A few years later, in 2000, again in Tuscany, in Peccioli, he restored an abandoned building that had a strong symbolic value for the inhabitants: it was the location where dance parties were held in the past and where many of them had met and fallen in love. In both projects the artist comes to grips with the theme of “public work”; a subject that from that moment on took on a primary importance for Garutti. The installations he created at the Biennial in Istanbul (2001), at the MAXXI in Rome (2009) and at Porta Nuova,
Milan (2012), were all characterised by a relationship determined by a siting strategy attentive to the relationships that come to be created between the work and the social and territorial environment in which it is placed. A presence - as the artist himself says - that must be invasive but “minimal, sentimental, economical, and without hierarchies”.
Photo © Agostino Osio, Alto Piano
Galbiate (Lecco), 1948
Lives and works: in Milan
Solo and group exhibitions and projects
Buchmann Galerie, Berlino (2015); Biennale Architettura, Venezia (2014, 2010); Edicola Notte, Roma (2013); PAC, Milano (2012); Aeroporto di Malpensa, Stazione Cadorna, Milano (2011); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2010); Fondazione Zegna, Trivero, Biella (2009); MAXXI, Roma (2009); Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia (2008); GAMec, Bergamo (2004); La Biennale di Venezia (2003); Museion, Bolzano (2002).
