Meulensteen is pleased to announce the opening of Andrea Galvani's first solo exhibition with the gallery, entitled A Few Invisible Sculptures. The show will open with a reception for the artist on the evening of Thursday, February 23rd, 2012, from 6 to 8 PM.
What are we talking about when we talk about sculpture? With the rigor and method characteristic of the American writer Raymond Carver, who in 1981 published a collection of short stories entitled, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Galvani calls widely accepted definitions of the medium into question. Thus A Few Invisible Sculptures provides a sober and insightful reflection on the function of contemporary sculpture, radically extending its boundaries. The exhibition will consist of an interdisciplinary body of work including sound sculpture, drawings, text-based works, collages and photographs, which cumulatively delve into phenomenological experiences to convey what the artist describes as an “architecture of the invisible.”
The project began with three minimalist sculptures constructed and later destroyed for the sound installation A Cube, a Sphere, and a Pyramid. Originally recorded in Germany, the audio track documents the echolocation of a group of bats flying around the suspended sculptures. Recorded with extreme precision, it provides a sonar scan of negative space around the objects, which is then played back at an audible frequency in an immersive installation of ten standing speakers. Extending the concept of an open sculpture, the exhibition also includes a text piece documenting a conversation Galvani had with a deaf electromagnetism researcher, collages that collapse memories of space to generate new and unstable forms, and photographs in which sculptures are used to produce actions. In all of these, the loop becomes a means to explore the physicality of consuming experience.
Andrea Galvani was born in Italy and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Drawing from other disciplines and often assuming scientific methodologies, his conceptual research informs his use of photography.
Work by Andrea Galvani has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York, NY; the Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim, UT; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento, Italy; Macro Museum, Rome, Italy; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Oslo Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark; and the Unicredit Pavillon, Bucharest, Romania. Four Works, the artist's most recent solo exhibition in New York, opened in July of 2011 on the occasion of his receiving the annual Exposure Prize from the Aperture Foundation. The same year, Andrea Galvani was included in the 4th Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art and nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
Galvani earned a BFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1999, and his MFA in Visual Art from Bilbao University in 2002. From 2006 to 2009, he was a professor of Photographic Language and the History of Contemporary Photography at the University of Carrara for Fine Arts in Bergamo, Italy.
