GIANFRANCO BARUCHELLO
CERTAIN IDEAS. RETROSPECTIVE

The Deichtorhallen Hamburg in cooperation with the ZKM in Karlsruhe will present the first major retrospective in Germany of the 89-year-old Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello at the Falckenberg Collection. Baruchello’s works have been shown at events such as the Venice Biennale in 2013 and Documenta in 1977 and 2012, but have not yet reached a wide audience in German-speaking countries.

Baruchello’s artistic style is based on the tension between cut-out pictorial elements and text fragments, between three-dimensional objects and pure painting, with which he partially or completely covers his works. His pictorial worlds are constituted in the empty spaces between hand drawings and figurative encyclopedias. Baruchello’s objects, assemblages and showcases are three-dimensional conceptual models and simultaneously radical formulas of their impossible inventories; his films are bizarre études that reveal the absurdity of the medium’s narration.

The enormous diversity of Baruchello’s oeuvre is evident not least in his numerous poems, prose texts, essays and small drawings. The stories and places of his life as well as his artistic, political and literary myths, including love, friends, gardens, Duchamp and Lacan, are reflected in his minimalist pictures and objects.