Made in Italy by Fallan Kjetil Lees-Maffei Grace & Kjetil Fallan

Author:Fallan, Kjetil,Lees-Maffei, Grace & Kjetil Fallan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2013-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

PART 3 SPACES

8 PRIVATE EXHIBITIONS: GALLERIES, ART AND INTERIOR DESIGN, 1920–1960

IMMA FORINO

ENTERING THROUGH A SECONDARY DOOR

This chapter enters the history of Italian interior design through the ‘secondary door’1 of private galleries—a paltry number of designs developed from the early twentieth century until today by Italian architects for whom gallery designs were an important exercise, before bigger and more famous commissions. Although, for the most part, these designs were soon lost, they were nevertheless significant if observed in the cultural context in which they were made. In fact, interiors for art were entrusted to designers by enlightened dealers and from the very beginning were established as terrains of design mediations: progressive dealers commissioned interiors for art that were not merely physical environments for the exhibition and sale of works of art but also spaces in which different areas of design could, and still can, come together.

An ‘Italian style’ for private galleries was clearly identifiable, in the form of interiorscapes in which the visitor was profoundly involved, to the same extent as the dealer and artist. This Italian style can be seen above all in the period between the early twentieth century and the 1970s, and design schemes for the arrangement of the space and the installation of artworks peaked with extraordinary projects during the 1940s (with the private galleries of BBPR [Gian Luigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano da Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and Ernesto Nathan Rogers], Carlo Scarpa and Franco Albini) and the 1950s (with Vittoriano Viganò’s galleries). During the post-war period the problem of reconstruction and the interpretation of the past became a peculiarity of Italian art museums,2 but interventions on pre-existing structures were actually already part of gallery design, in a series of sporadic minor interventions, almost always of limited size, designed for private clients who felt the need to create special places for exhibiting and selling contemporary art to an elite public.

From the 1970s onwards, a radical change in the art scene in Italy as well as in the rest of the world—seen in, for example, arte povera, large installations, performances and body art—created a need for new types of spaces. There was a turn away from galleries with an almost domestic quality, environments as confined as they were refined, and towards large spaces, frequently former garages or basements, in which architectural intervention seemed less necessary. The gallery therefore became a place for events, in which art as experience imposed itself on the architectural space and its visitors. The exhibitions at Fabio Sargentini’s L’Attico caused a sensation, for example: in 1969 Jannis Kounellis set twelve live horses to graze in the gallery, which was located in a garage in Via Beccaria, Rome. More striking still, in 1976, was the flooding of the very same space with 50,000 litres (13,208 US gallons) of water to symbolise the closure of the space and the beginning of a new phase of research for Sargentini and his artists.

Only in the mid-1990s did Italian galleries adjust to an art market that did not appeal only

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