Focus On: Monica Bonvicini

Curated by Christina Végh with Monica Bonvicini the solo show at Kunsthalle Bielefeld presents the artist's most recent works, most of which were made specifically for the exhibition, across several media such as installation, sculpture, photography, and video. The artist choice of the show’s title, LOVER'S MATERIAL, refers to the author Franz Schulze's characterization of the relationship between the Kunsthalle's architect, Philip Johnson, and his partner Jon Stroup. In Schulze's biography of Johnson, Stroup is described as "comfortably passive". For Bonvicini, this patronizing definition means also that relationships can also be defined as something both objectifying and rationalizing. Starting with this idea, the whole exhibition delves into the relationships—economic and private, as well as political—that are linked to exhibition spaces.

In the exhibition’s central room, Bonvicini has laid down Breach of Decor, a large-scale composition of carpets covering up most of the floor. The work carefully assembles images of a photographic series that the artist took over a long period of time. The images double the visitors’ point of view from above; they depict fragments of different kinds of flooring with lying garments. Walking on the work and exploring familiar interior scenes of daily life, the audience finds itself in ambivalent vertigo of visual perspective and ironic détournement.

An earlier example of Bonvicini's use of pink spray paint to stencil words is the artist's 2017 series of wall works exhibited in her first exhibition at the gallery. This series, inspired by Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie, consist of prints of a multitude of cuts-out of body parts taken from scrap magazines and tabloids. In the resulting composition every sexual reference vanishes and a vivid analysis emerges underlining how pleasure and body parts are considered commodification objects. Each one of the four works shows a spray-painted portion of the sentence “I like to stand with one leg on each side of the wall” taken from the text The German Issue by Heiner Müller in Venetian pink.

Monica Bonvicini has employed Marlboro advertising imagery in her practice since 1993; the screen-printed image is in fact from a poster of the time. The cowboy riding his horse next to a wooden fence and barbed wire, a symbol of codified machismo, is a figure that is even more disturbing today, considering the migratory flows that affect the border between Mexico and the United States as well as European territory. The work shown here, Marlboro Man (2019) is large screen-print on aluminum plates and was exhibited as part of Unrequited Love, Bonvicini's second solo show with the gallery.

The iron and blown glass sculpture Fleurs du Mal (pink) is also from 2019. Pink glass objects hang from the hooks of a structure that recalls as an overblown portrait of Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (1914). This image describes an uncanny environment between nature and domesticity that, like the prairie overseen by the Marlboro Man, is risky territory.

The domestic environment and the impact of architecture on private life was explored in further focus in the exhibition space in via A. Stradella 1, where Bonvicini installed a dusty pink carpet and wallpaper-sized photographs from the Italian Homes (2019) series. Placed on top of this wallpaper, three large scale works on paper from 2002, Places of ID (Three People at the…), Pin Up Girl, and Vitruvius, offer intriguing relationships between architecture, history, and sexuality.

For years, Bonvicini has been carrying out photographic documentation of family houses in Lombardy that were designed and built towards the end of the 1960s for the ‘traditional’ family of the time. The current appearance of these buildings, once rigorously identical in all their parts, reflects the economic and demographic changes of their communities in the past fifty years, resulting in discordant and incompatible aesthetics that create unusual and curious juxtapositions. The Italian Homes series was shown in its entirety on the occasion of As Walls Keep Shifting, the artist's 2019 solo exhibition at OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin, curated by Nicola Ricciardi with Samuele Piazza.

Monica Bonvicini's 1999 installation I Believe in the Skin of Things as in that of Women, currently on view at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart as part of the exhibition WÄNDE I WALLS, refers to the connection between architecture, space, and gender. First shown at the 51st Venice Biennial curated by Harald Szeemann, the work consists of a room built out of drywall panels that have been hammered down and cut through. Inside there are drawings in pencil similar to caricatures accompanied by texts on architecture and gender, from Alberti to Zaha Hadid. In the brief videos below, former Museion director Letizia Ragaglia speaks about the work and its lasting legacy.

In this conversation with MAXXI director Hou Hanru presented as part of the public program for the 2019 exhibition The Street. Where the World Is Made, Monica Bonvicini invites visitors to question the border between public and private, compelling us not to “lose a second” of what happens around us, in the street, starting from the work Don’t Miss a Sec’. (2004), a minimalist glass pavilion that amplifies the notion of minimal art with a witty humor in the moment she put a functioning toilette inside.

The video work No Head Man is the aftermath of the performance realised in 2006 for the 27th São Paulo Biennial. Bonvicini choreographed four male actors to perform gestures that critically addressed the architectural space and the hegemonic influence of the ‘white cube,’ the modernist ideal for an art museum. Both minimal and explicit, No Head Man seeks to expose and undermine the gender and position-based entitlements that are far too common in the contemporary art field. This video is currently on view at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome as part of FUORI, the 2020 Quadriennale d'Arte, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol.