by
Francesco Vezzoli
by Francesco Vezzoli
2016
Catalogue of Vezzoli's double project at Museion: as guest curator, presenting an exhibition of the Museion collection, and as artist, with the first complete retrospective of his sculptural work. Accompanying the projects grouped under the same title at Museion in Bolzano, Museo Museion is designed like a fictitious old guide to a museum of peculiar, striking juxtapositions: between what is ancient and what is newly added, and between what is real and what is illusionary. Here, for the first time, Vezzoli plays both artist and curator. In his sculptural works, placed on the top floor along a long podium like a silent, mocking regiment—and scattered through the book as plates, glued to the pages—the artist “embraces the risk of tampering with historic artworks” by adding new features to mutilated originals. The resulting paradoxes look outlandish, but are indeed only the latest example of what has long been a defining aspect of Western art and culture: how it deals with antiquities. Meanwhile, on the floors below, Vezzoli-as-curator selected a significant sample of the museum's collection, grouped it according to theme and genre, and reframed it, both literally and conceptually: works by Lucio Fontana, Nan Goldin, Carla Accardi, and others are bordered by trompe l'œil reproductions of the frames from key paintings by Bronzino, Raphael, Ingres, etc.—to intriguing effect. All of these pairings are illustrated and annotated in the book.