Commisioned by Foam

Artist
Lorenzo Vitturi

Curator
Kim Knoppers

Date
18 October 2019 – 19 January 2020

The body of work of Lorenzo Vitturi (1980, Italy) investigates urban changes beyond Western cities, processes of cultural mixing and their complexities, and the movement of people and goods in a globalised world.

Playing with the combination of reality and fiction, mixing photography, sculpture, painting and performance, he builds temporary sets in his studio, drawing from specific geographical environments. His projects focus on cities including Lagos, London and Venice and selected areas in Peru; on their colours and shapes and the communities that inhabit them. Vitturi uses selected materials in his sculptures and photographs to investigate the passage of time in a globalised world, capturing its mutations.

The exhibition Materia Impura summarises ten years of research, combining Vitturi’s earlier projects Dalston Anatomy, Droste Effect, Debris and Other Problems and Money Must Be Made. It also presents the first output of Vitturi’s new work Caminantes (Spanish for walkers). This project draws inspiration from his family history and explores the encounters between and merging of different cultures. In the 1960s, his father, originally from Venice, crossed the Atlantic to open a Murano glass factory in Peru.

In Vitturi’s photographs, we see a cacophony of texture and colour. The camera documents the makeshift sculptures and interventions in the landscape, and as such, they endure. The landscape interventions mirror the impermanent nature of a rapidly changing globalised world in which cultures fuse. Meanwhile, their reintroduction in the exhibition space as photographic images and physical sculptures allows us to reflect on constant cycles of production, destruction, and recreation.

The exhibition is made possible by the Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds.