curated by Laura Barreca
10.2007
During the mid-nineties Milan was a point of reference for the Italian contemporary art scene, a vital link to the other European economic capitals and a symbol of Italian production. They were years of end of millennium anxiety, but also of hope for that of the new arriving with the internet, globalisation and new technologies. The Internet would perhaps allow the possibility for new type of existence, if not better, at least different. In those years, expectation was mingled with desire, especially for the young. It is therefore not difficult to imagine the thoughts of a group of moneyless students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, when, their Fine Arts courses completed, the city was to be their oyster. At this point, the story does not let down expectations and – after a few years in the ranks also but of fast opening doors – among other protagonists of those roaring nineties, Stefania Galegati, Simone Berti, Sarah Ciracì, Joseph Gabellone, Diego Perrone, Deborah Ligorio started to make their first inroads in the city. “We lived in via Fiuggi, which was both our home and studio,” says Stefania Galegati. “Gallery owners, critics, curators would come to see us, we drank coffee and talked about our work and about art. We didn’t exactly work as a team – we shared the space and worked independently. Living together for three years we all grew.”
The period 1994-1997 is, in fact, remembered by many in Milan since some of the most interesting contemporary Italian artists hail from that basement in via Fiuggi before the turn of the new century. A group exhibition in 1994 at viafarini in Milan brought them together for the first time and in an article published in the magazine Flash Art they were called the ‘next generation’ of Italian art. Since then they have gone their own ways and each of them has continued to work with the same debunking, poetic approach as at the beginning. In the work of artist Stefania Galegati the meaning still contains an echo of the pure conceptual instruction instilled by Alberto Garutti in lessons during his painting courses. At her first solo show in 1996 – at Francesca Pennone’s NewSantandrea gallery in Savona – Stefania Galegati exhibited a series of pictures in which the artist, body fully painted, was camouflaged in real spaces and photos of objects were recreated as distorted wide angle images. Since then, the artist has exhibited at solo and group exhibitions in many places, first in Europe, then in 2003 in the United States, where she won an annual scholarship as part of the PS1 Study Program in New York. This scholarship was offered to very few Italian artists before being permanently suspended a few years ago. From the very beginning Galegati’s works have always been suspended between tones of mocking vision and raw clarity in her dealing of the present. The use of different mediums from photography to ambient installations, from video to sculpture, denotes a total linguistic autonomy and has allowed her, along with other artists of her generation, to free herself from the identities of the founders of the Transavantgarde and Arte Povera, hitherto considered the only Italian movements capable of competing on an international level. In the nineties the desire to retaliate against the material, in favour of a conceptual construction is seen in the absolute freedom of artistic production, sarcastic creativity and in the detached, scientific perspective on reality, almost as if an ethnographer were looking through the lens of a microscope.
Stefania Galegati’s work is tied to the observation of the commonplace, the tongue-in-cheek mise en scène of mass rites – of categories and forms of collective approval, an invisible web of behaviors, attitudes and gestures within which society seems trapped. The artist’s camera and videocamera store hundreds of images taken from everyday life, but also from particular situations: fragments from everywhere, tied to different situations, private and global events stacked together – that create for us the idea of a world without borders, governed instead by the activities that designate real life, rendering each individual more alike. Stefania Galegati speaks to us of many “globalized” microcosms, each of which painted like a colorful carousel, spinning to the tempo of an electro track or a tango. The work that the artist has produced through a constant activity of daily recording is an almost manic documentation of the present, in which every frame tells a unique story. For her first solo exhibition in Palermo Stefania Galegati has produced a video and photo installation, in which the two videos “Implosion” (2006) and “Time of the South” (2006) are accompanied by a selection of slides taken over the last two years. An installation of around twenty prints, set up in one of the two gallery rooms, recreates a complex vision of the world seen through the invisible details of everyday life. The latest work of Stefania Galegati for Palermo is a series of twenty red shirts and is the initial phase of a project which will go on to produce 1,000 copies. The artist has hand-painted the shirts with an image/logo of Garibaldi, the popular Italian hero, whose image can be found in many squares and streets not only in Italy but throughout the world.
