Browse Exhibits (11 total)

This exhibition has been created thanks to the donation of some of Pablo Echaurren's unrealized projects to MoRE Museum. The artist had previously collaborated with the museum of the unrealized works, once in 2019 thanks to an initial donation Artisti coraggiosi Natura Morta - 2 (1971-1974) curated by Raffaella Perna, and later in 2021 with participation in the conference Lockdown of the project together with Cristina Casero.

This virtual exhibition “The notebook of unrealized art”. Pablo Echaurren thinks of Marcel Duchamphas made it possible to create another collaboration between MoRE Museum and MAMbo, the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, which at the same time opens a solo exhibition in the Pablo Echaurren project room curated by Sara De Chiara.

quaderno per home page

If the exhibition hosted by the Bologna Museum aims to investigate the relationship between Echaurren and the city of Bologna by focusing on a central date (for both) such as 1977, the virtual exhibition abandons the artist's political approach to investigate less known aspects revolving around Marcel Duchamp.

As already underlined by Cristina Casero and Raffaella Perna, it is possible to understand the work of Pablo Echaurren as the "negation of the work as a fetish".

This line of interpretation (in addition to connoting the artist's work in a direction of Duchampian aesthetics) finds fertile ground in the whole design of the museum of unrealized works

Although Duchamp has been an important figure for the artist (indeed he dedicated numerous projects to him, including realized ones), Duchamp and Echaurren never met. However, their virtual meeting was possible through two important figures, Gianfranco Baruchello and Arturo Schwarz.

The interpretation of Echaurren’s works through the filter of this political activity is indeed now consolidated as it has been investigated considering the projects with Indiani metropolitani, his pollical activism, and his collaboration with the newspaper Lotta Continua.

The intention of this virtual exhibition, to give a different interpretation to the MAMbo exhibition, is to highlight the several aspects that relate to the two artists and that makes Echaurren reflect on the most hidden aspects of the famous French artist.

Echaurren's production is rich and heterogeneous, ranging from painting, illustration, comics, ceramics, record covers, and over fifty books, including “Duchamp politique”. In this book, Echaurren explores the French artist's work on an existential level, the anti-system one that is the Duchamp who rejected the art market.

Even before the publication of this book, in 1977 Echaurren wrote “Dall’io al noi. Da Duchamp a Duchamps. U/siamo tutti Duchamp. Non è una questione di eleggere un oggetto ad un’opera d’arte (ready made). Questa è una mistificazione del mercato che cerca oggetti da vendere e totemizzare. Non è questione di eleggere un oggetto ad opera d’arte stessa (la sua funzione di feticcio) in un oggetto di uso comune”. [1] This phrase, already quoted by Raffaella Perna, confirms Echaurren's interest in Marcel Duchamp. The French artist becomes a sort of fil rouge for most of Echaurren's works.

In fact, there are many projects in which Echaurren reinterprets Duchamp (not only through the magnifying glass of the ready-made) but rather a Duchamp far from the art market and from the idea of a work of art as a fetish, a more cerebral Duchamp who sheds his persona to offer himself to the Roman artist almost in a private space.

This exhibition, therefore, moves on these assumptions and wants to explore this lesser-known aspect of the artist. Research that goes beyond the usual political approach and wants to enhance a group of projects in which Duchamp is a point of reference. The exhibition is therefore composed of a small selection of unrealized works where emerges the desire to not adhere to the Duchampian language of the ready-made, but rather to a Duchampian ethic of artistic work, if it can be defined as such.

Therefore, the virtual exhibition starts with few pages of a notebook, almost all of Echaurren's projects have been conceived on this medium. These pages return notes written before drawings, they are transcribed ideas that bring out the artist's design methodology which is based first of all on writing.

In the booklet of 1977, a fundamental date for the artist as he decided to retire from the art world, we read the title of a page “Il quaderno dell’arte non fatta. Solo pensata. Solo appuntata” (“The notebook of unrealized art. Only thought. Only written down”).

The notebook is divided into various writings and on the second page already emerge the figure of Duchamp and the practice of the Exquisite Corpse, which is taken as a model of a project where authorship is lost.

Anyway, not many unrealized projects surface from the booklet, but only one in which Duchamp is still a key figure. In fact, Echaurren wants to dedicate a sort of parade to the French artist through the creation of silent banners (without any writing), or through banners showing the question or exclamation mark only. This project is a sort of conceptual parade that reflects the French artist’s work.

The third project is based on Duchamp's famous ready-made Bicycle Wheel, which is sketched with a blue pen on a piece of paper. En attendant la mariée (2012) consists of a written and a drawn part, the drawing shows a complex installation project built with a bicycle wheel, a spinning wheel and a system of threads coming down from the ceiling through chrysalises.

The fourth work is entitled Monumento fortuito (2015), realized with a blue pen on a squared sheet, without drawings or notes of a different nature.  The project is written only. Eucharren wants to create a monument for the French artist through "a leftover, a human waste" found on the street.

The last two project are two small sculptures: the first one is Mon Alice (2018), a plastic figurine of "Alice from Wonderland" with a mustache drawn in ink, clearly quoting Duchamp's work on the Mona Lisa; while the second work is a small sculpture of a monkey with an iron, the design quotes Duchamp's famous phrase of using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. The first title clearly shows the quote and shows how Echaurren works on a famous contemporary icon of Disney world, following a path already traced by the French artist.

These works highlight how important it is for Echaurren to work on a continuous rethinking of Duchampian themes.

This exhibition starts from the first youthful project of 1977 to move drastically to the last decades, this sudden leap shows how the French artist always remains a pivotal node. Echaurren approaches and reflects on all the elements that punctuate Duchamp's work: from the ready-made to the masculine and feminine shift. He also touches on his famous exhibitions such as the International Surrealist Exhibition held in New York (1942).

[1] Pablo Echaurren, from the notebook Macchine coniugi, Duchamp, Flussi, 1977, preserved at the Fondazione Echaurren Salaris, Roma.

Luca Vitone
The charm of the unrealised

Writing about unrealised artworks has its own charm. First of all, we talk about these projects only virtually, we don't have a finished object and we know that an artist while in the process of making has got the time to think and follow day by day the formation of the artwork, with the possibility of changing some details when he believes it is better to modify something. Then we will never be able to see a finished object, which remains present only in the mind of the artist, but only sketches prepared for the presentation of the project. Sometimes these changes are not just the result of artistic desires, but are also related to the needs of the client and to the feasibility of the project, which is verified in progress and depends on economic or logistical reasons.
In our case the artists invited for this exhibition have given us different reasons to justify the non-realisation of their projects and these reasons help us to understand the different ways and why an artwork is – or is not – realized.

But let's look at these cases one by one and try to offer a reflection on making art.
Mark Dion presents a pharaonic project, which reminds us of Giovanni Segantini's unrealized one for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris. A pavilion designed for the centenary of a park, that should have contained various cultural institutions that represent its activities. In this case the project had not accepted by the judging commission and its memory remains thanks to a series of drawings and an articulated text, which tells us the reasons and merits of this idea, unfortunately still only on paper. 
Maria Eichhorn does not tell us if her project started from the request of a client or if it is simply the result of her work in the studio. She simply proposes us an architectural project of some degree of consistency that has not been realized for unknown reasons. Probably the panoramic tower has never found the right occasion to be proposed, or maybe the artist, considering that the financial commitment for its realization would have been conspicuous, has decided to postpone it, while distracted by the necessity to finish other already confirmed artworks.
For Till Krause the situation is slightly different. He declares that he designed his project independently and then submitted it to a jury that did not accept it. It is of particular interest that Till then adds in his report that the project has not been realized also because "I didn’t try hard enough". This is an interesting statement because it shows us the sincere awareness of his own responsibility, an attitude that is not so common in general among humans and most of all in the spirit of the artist.
Daniel Maier-Reimer, following his methodology, proposes a journey across the sea, but the MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) rejected his proposal. In this case the artist, following the iconoclastic modalities he adopts for the presentation of his artworks, does not present us with drawings, itineraries, maps and images, so that everything remains in the mind of the creator and we just have less than half a dozen written lines that allow us to imagine it. Here the artist keeps everything for himself and leaves us alone with the possibility of fantasizing about what he would have seen and what he would have brought us as a result of his work.
Veit Stratmann proposes a work that he says has been "designed not to be realized". Here is an unusual statement; but this abnormality makes us think about the themes put forward by the author: safety, control, ecology and good conscience. All these arguments concern us and according to the ideology we follow can produce very different and sometimes opposite reactions. Here is the impossibilty of putting the work into practice, which with its absence reveals this idiosyncrasy of the terms, which according to an ideological interpretation manifests the vulnerability of the thought.
Cesare Viel presents a project that has evaporated during its own development for economic reasons and above all because when it was initially designed no specific client had been identified. Two airplanes that, while flying, show us two sentences (a usual practice for the artist) that make us reflect on our state and on what surrounds us. A reflection that makes us understand how in the moment of the elaboration of an idea everything is volatile and its realization depends on our will, but also on the opportunities that are offered us.

These materials are witness of a very important way of doing for an artist: designing the artwork beyond its realization. It is not entirely important that the artwork has been realized, the important thing is to imagine it and to sediment it with a project, because this is the daily exercise that an artist has to carry out so that he can set in motion his own practice, useful for the realization of finished artworks.
MoRE has the merit of collecting materials that would have remained inside a drawer and that would have never been known, excluding a personal attendance at the artist studio, but mainly it has the important function of making the artist’s working procedures well-known to a wider public, presenting objects that would never have been known, beyond the notoriety that an artist could achieve.
Here is the fascination that we started with: the possibility of accessing the most unknown design places inside the mind of an artist who, with notes, sketches and drawings testifies to his artistic progress.

Berlin, March 23rd 2019

The desire to create a small virtual exhibition of unrealised pictorial projects stems from the need to analyse the pictorial medium within the contemporary artistic production. Five years ago we started the MoRE Museum project and in this time we have collected about one hundred unfinished works, all designed to be performances, installations, videos and sculptures. After years of work, my research as a curator at MoRE wants to address the art of painting, with the aim of understanding (through various acquisitions structured into several outputs) how the artistic discipline par excellence is "designed" - if I am allowed to use this term - and how, in some cases, it fails to become a reality.

This exhibition presents four unrealised projects by Luca Vitone, conceived between 2002 and 2010 for several public art competitions, three in Italy and one in Germany. Here they are presented in chronological order: Una tigre per Torino, project for the competition Premio ArteGiovane - Torino incontra l’arte. Una porta per Torino, 2002; Design competition for Piazza Verdi – La Spezia with Frank Boehm, 2009; Concorso per la progettazione di un monumento dedicato ai disertori del nazismo, Cologne, 2009; Foglie al vento, project for the competition Arte per piazza Matteotti - Imola (Bo), 2010. 

In March 1991 the collector and publisher Francesco Conz, in collaboration with the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti - MSU of Zagreb, invited a few artists who had been part of Gorgona, the Croatian Croatian avant-garde group active between 1959 and 1961, to an artistic residency at the castle of Brunnenburg in Merano, Italy.

During their residency, the five artists created thirteen works of art as well as fifteen hand-made copies of each work. All of which were created on the same size of paper (30x42 cm), as used by the artists who participated in the residencies for La Livre edition.

However, contrary to their initial intentions, the group distanced itself from Ezra Pound because of the possible political implications conveyed by his figure. Neither La Livre nor any single issue that should have included the works created by the artists of Gorgona during their residency were ever completed and therefore published.