Alberto Garutti is the winner of the International Art Competition for the "Three Thresholds of Ca' Corniani"
Ca’ Corniani. Terra d’avanguardia: Alberto Garutti is the winner of the international art competition by invitation - curated by Eight Art Project - to create the works for the Three Thresholds of Ca' Corniani, the historic Genagricola estate.
The jury selected his project The Three Landscape Stories for its strong visual impact and high artistic value.
The art competition for the Three Thresholds of Ca' Corniani is part of a broader project to enhance the landscape of the estate.
The competition benefits from the landscape design and curatorship of Andreas Kipar and the artistic curatorship of Elena Tettamanti and Antonella Soldaini.
The design of the landscape masterplan is by the international landscape architecture studio LAND.
Alberto Garutti's artworks were inaugurated in May 2018 to coincide with the opening of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
A large golden roof for the old farmhouse, which is now abandoned, a neon sign that lights up every time lightning strikes in Italy, and portrait sculptures of the dogs and horses that live on the farm: these will be the three works that will welcome all those who enter Ca' Corniani from June 2018 by crossing the Three Thresholds at the entrance to the historic estate in Genagricola, in the province of Venice.
The three works are part of the project The Three Landscape Stories with which the artist Alberto Garutti ( 1948 - 2023 ) won the international art competition by invitation, conceived as the first official stage of the Ca' Corniani landscape enhancement project.
The competition, launched last June with the artistic curatorship of Elena Tettamanti and Antonella Soldaini and the landscape curatorship of Andreas Kipar, involved five European artists - Monica Bonvicini, Alberto Garutti, Carsten Höller, Tobias Rehberger and Remo Salvadori - who were called upon by the curators to present as many site-specific works for the three access points to Ca'Corniani, with the aim of marking the entrance to the estate and narrating the richness of this area with its strongly agricultural and productive vocation.
On 22 September, an international jury - made up of Gabriella Belli (Director of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia), Pippo Ciorra (Senior curator of the MAXXI Museum), Philippe Donnet (Group CEO of Generali), Giancarlo Fancel (President of Genagricola and Chief Financial Officer of Generali Italia), Andreas Kipar (Founding Partner of LAND), Beatrice Merz (President of the Swiss Merz Foundation and of the Mario Merz Prize), Marco Sesana (Country Manager and Managing Director of Generali Italia), Elena Tettamanti (Founder Eight Art Project) and Vicente Todolì (Artistic Director Hangar Bicocca) - after examining the projects selected that of Alberto Garutti perfectly in keeping with the history and landscape of Ca' Corniani, which with its 1700 hectares inland from Caorle is one of Italy's largest farms.
Ca' Corniani has the particularity of being a completely flat area surrounded by water, whose boundaries are delimited by the banks of the Livenza river and the artificial canals created at the time of the 1851 land reclamation. Strategic for the estate are therefore the three access points, accessible by land and water.
The competition represented an important first moment of confrontation and relationship between the artists and this very special place: on the one hand it brought them closer to the high historical and productive value of the place, and on the other it stimulated forms of sharing with the local and wider socio-cultural context.
Alberto Garutti's works for these three key points were born precisely from this confrontation and will be able to attract interest and trigger a process of discovery of the place, due to their distinct and recognisable ability to permanently integrate art and agriculture, opening up new forms of dialogue, development and revitalisation of the territory.
Alberto Garutti's artworks were inaugurated at the end of May 2018, on the occasion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
