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Artist: Gianfranco Baruchello

Massimo De Carlo presents the first exhibition by Gianfranco Baruchello in its Milan gallery in Palazzo Belgioioso. Greenhouse brings together an extraordinary selection of works that span from the 1960’s to 2016.
 

Massimo De Carlo presents the first exhibition by Gianfranco Baruchello in its Milan gallery in Palazzo Belgioioso. Greenhouse brings together an extraordinary selection of works that span from the 1960’s to 2016.
 














Through his long and on going, unique, career Gianfranco Baruchello has explored and materialized through art his interest in the relationship between the mechanisms of the mind and their relationship with urbanism, design, anatomy, agriculture and nature.

In his practice Gianfranco Baruchello, regarded by mentor Marcel Duchamp as his only possible heir, has tackled a vast array of mediums spanning from land art to video via painting and has counted amongst his friends many influential historical figures, artists and thinkers of this and the last century. In the 1970’s after a decade of profitably engaging with the Parisian and New York art scenes, first hand witnessing and participating in the rise of Pop Art and of the then ascending art market, Baruchello decided to move on. Not wanting to abide to the fashions of the moment, he decided to characterise himself as a soloist, moving to the Roman countryside in 1973.


Greenhouse exemplifies Gianfranco Baruchello’s understanding of nature as a language, a biological iconography that encompasses and embodies values, gestures, metamorphoses, empathy and truth. This language becomes tangible through a series of exceptional signature large canvases - populated by minuscule figures and drawings, the iconic 1970’s box compositions, sculptures, and installations.

Greenhouse embodies the heritage of the artist Agricola Cornelia experience: a farm in the Roman hills where the artist lived and worked from 1973 until 1998, which is now the Fondazione Baruchello. Each work becomes a graphic reflection on the relationship between man, nature and the ever-changing urban landscape. For Gianfranco Baruchello nature is an open space that the artist recodifies through miniaturizing, reducing, sculpting and enclosing it. Baruchello’s key topic of the anti-monumental is reshaped through the daily gestures, laying out and maintaining a garden, which mimics and mirrors the one of our mind.
Greenhouse traces a life long reflection on space, shapes and land that tackles the grey area, crude yet oneiric, between the self and the other.

Gianfranco Baruchello was born in Livorno, Italy in 1924. He lives and works in Rome.
Solo exhibitions include: Artists' Film Club, Verifica Incerta (screening), ICA, London, UK; Certain Ideas, Retrospektive, ZMK, Karlsruhe, Germany; Retrospective, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, Germany (2014); Loss of Quality, Loss of Identity, Fondazione Volume, Rome, Italy (2014); Cold Cinema, curate by Alessandro Rabottini, Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy (2014 ); Certe Idee, Galleria Nazionale d‘Arte Moderna, GNAM, Rome, Italy (2011). Gianfranco Baruchello took part in the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2013 and in the 2012 edition of Documenta.
His works are also on display in the collections of, among other museums, the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Triennale Design Museum in Milan and the Madre museum in Naples.