Centennial Anniversary of TRUSSARDI

To mark the hundredth anniversary of the Trussardi Group, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presented 8½, an exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni and produced in collaboration with the Fondazione Pitti Discovery. The exhibition took place from the 13th January 2011 till the 6th February 2011 at the monumental spaces of Stazione Leopolda (Via Fratelli Rosselli 5, Florence, Italy). 8½ brought together the works of the thirteen international artists to whom the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has dedicated ambitious solo exhibitions and spectacular public art projects in Milan, from 2003 to the present.

Like a carnival parade, 8½ brought together for the very first time the works of Darren Almond, Pawel Althamer, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal: artists who have established themselves over the last decade as some of the most significant figures in the international art scene. The aim of this exhibition was to present an overview of the most groundbreaking projects produced to date by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, retracing the key stages of its activity and illuminating an important chapter in the history of recent contemporary art.

A nomadic museum and agency for the promotion of contemporary art and culture, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi organizes and produces major exhibitions specially conceived for forgotten buildings, architectural landmarks, and symbolic spaces around Milan, restoring them and reopening them to the city and to the public. For the first time, with 8½, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi organised an event in Florence, where from 11th to 14th January 2011 the Trussardi Group was the guest of honor at Pitti Immagine Uomo 79. The four fields in which the brand has been working for years to redefine the “made in Italy” label—fashion, design, art and cuisine—were showcased in an initiative that primarily revolved around Stazione Leopolda, a nineteenth-century former train station in the centre of Florence. For the occasion, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi brought to Florence some of the most important works it has commissioned and presented in the last eight and a half years, along with several unchallenged masterpieces by contemporary artists.

As evoked by the title borrowed from Federico Fellini’s legendary film, 8½ was a story in images, an endless series of flashbacks and premonitions, memories and déjà vus. The works by these thirteen artists unfurled through the majestic nineteenth-century naves of Stazione Leopolda like a carousel of dreams and obsessions, fantasies and longings, touching both intimate, personal spheres and the social, collective realm. 8½ knitted together scenes from real life and states of permanent hallucination, to create an extraordinary gallery of wonders.

Martin Creed, Everything Is Going to Be Alright (Work # 1086), 2011, Photo by Marco De Scalzi

Everything is Going to Be Alright, the neon sign by Martin Creed that stretched across the facade of Stazione Leopolda, seemed like a preface to this giant game, but it was also a warning: with its excessive enthusiasm, the work served as an ironic comment on what visitors found beyond the threshold. And indeed, inside the former railway station, a series of unexpected encounters unfolded. Elmgreen & Dragset’s white car and trailer, like a metaphor for global tourism, emerged from the floor after a long, imaginary journey to the center of the earth, while a few steps away, the giant self-portrait by Polish sculptor Pawel Althamer—a balloon over 20 meters long—loomed above our heads like some outlandish, temporary public monument, hypertrophic and carnivalesque. The surreal full-length film Parts of a Film with a Rat and a Bear by Fischli and Weiss, shot in Palazzo Litta during the major retrospective of the Swiss duo’s work organized by the Fondazione Trussardi, acted as a counterpoint to Paul McCarthy’s provocative, caustic depiction of George W. Bush in Static (Pink), while Darren Almond’s intimate, melancholy portraits entertained a dialogue with Urs Fischer’s House of Bread, which seemed to have come straight out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. The grotesque events recounted by John Bock in his film Meechfieber—a potpourri of surreal machines, bric-a-brac spaceships, costumed animals and frenetic dances—contrasted with the musical lament of saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, portrayed by Anri Sala in his film Long Sorrow. The silent, contemplative ambience of Still Life and Day for Night, two films that Tacita Dean shot in Giorgio Morandi’s former studio, revealing the myriad stories that have lain hidden for decades, served as a perfect frame for Maurizio Cattelan’s reflections on death and the fragility of life. Visitors were plunged into a playful, yet tragic atmosphere: Paola Pivi’s unsettling multitudes and the living sculptures directed by Tino Sehgal were like alien presences that turned the spaces of Stazione Leopolda into the perfect background for a new, enigmatic theater of the absurd.