Based on the reasessing of conceptual and narrative strategies in the 1990s, the exhibition specifically planed for the intimate and domestic space of the Javier Lopez Gallery in Madrid, is designed as a pseudo-private interior. All the works presented hear deas with the status of the art object, renegociating their positions within problematics such as the use and exchange values, their ressemblance to traditional categories of artforms and their possible integration to private contexts.
Artists:
· Stéphane Dafflon
· Vydia Gastaldon & Jean-Michel Wicker
· Liam Gillick
· Matthieu Mercier
· Mai-Thu Perret
· Daniel Roth
· Xavier Veilhan
· Andrea Zittel
The title of the show is taken from Emilio Ambasz project at the MoMA of New York in 1972, entitled “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”. One of the most important exhibition ever realized on utopian design, it was giving an account of the recent developments in Italian design towards a new way of living. Solutions for getting rid of any superfluous forniture and integrating useful elements of “modern” life were thus proposed by Etlore Sotlsass, Joe Colombo or Bruno Munari. Thirty years later, it seemed relevant to me to quote this example as an important background for artists trying to cope with the art system´s realities without nostalgic-utopian strategles (visible in most of the art production longing for desing) nor frontal refusals (as it is the case with political orientated art), but through infiltration, contamination and the perversity of their narrative or semantic dispositives.