GIOVANNI MORBIN

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

Giovanni Morbin, Portrait of Francesco, 2005 – Blood on cotton paper, 29.5 x 22 inch

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OPENING:  Saturday, 19 November 2005 – h 6.00 pm

21 November 2005 – 21 January 2006

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Curated by SIMONE MENEGOI

The Italian artist Giovanni Morbin (Valdagno, 1956) presents a selection of recent works at the Artericambi gallery. It is a cycle of paintings on paper made with human blood (“Portraits”); a large structure of steel and plexiglas (“Social sculpture”); a “Breathtaking instrument” in glass and the brass sculpture “Forza Nuova”. These last two works were created specifically for the exhibition.

Giovanni Morbin has been working for several years in Italy, Slovenia and other European countries, mostly in non-profit and public art contexts. His works – actions, photographs, objects – focus on physical, psychological and symbolic relationships between the human being and the surrounding world: other men, animals, plants and even inanimate beings, in a non-hierarchical vision of reality. The most recent works examine the relationships between individuals, and see the artist as the epicenter of these relationships. Sometimes they have already taken place; sometimes they still have to happen, and in this case the works are ‘tools’ (in the literal sense of tools, tools) to trigger them.

The first group includes the “Portraits”, a series of almost perfectly identical paintings on paper, each commissioned by a different person and made with a small amount of his own blood given to the artist. The structure of the paintings, only apparently abstract, reproduces a detail of human lung structure taken from a medical manual from the early 1900s. “Social sculpture” and “Breathtaking instrument” are part of the second group, that of the ‘tools’ to provoke a relationship and an exchange. “Social sculpture” (the title is a tribute to the German artist Joseph Beuys) is made up of steel modules that can be disassembled and integrated into the domestic furniture, preparing it for further, unpredictable interventions by the artist. “A breathtaking instrument” instead proposes a relationship between the spectator and himself. It is a kind of glass mouthpiece that goes from the mouth, going around the head, to the ear. It was created to give meaning and social acceptability to an action usually considered deviant: that of ‘speaking for oneself’ – that is, to oneself. “Forza Nuova” is closer to the traditional idea of sculpture. A polished brass rod ending in a point, practically the materialization of the trajectory of a bullet, leans threateningly from the wall towards the viewer. The title of the exhibition, I’ve got you under my skin, is an ironic allusion to this and other forces that penetrate, with seduction or violence, under our skin.

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Giovanni Morbin, Social sculpture, 2005 – Steel modules

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(SINISTRA) Giovanni Morbin, Portrait of Anna, 2005 – Blood on cotton paper, 29.5 x 22 inch / (DESTRA) Giovanni Morbin, Portrait of Giovanni, 2005 – Blood on cotton paper, 29.5 x 22 inch

Giovanni Morbin, Forza Nuova, 2005 – Brass, 78 x 0.3 inch of diameter

Giovanni Morbin, Breathtaking instrument, 2005 – Glass

Giovanni Morbin, Social sculpture, 2003 – Steel modules

Giovanni Morbin, Social sculpture, 2003 – Steel modules