Fausto Melotti
I lavandai (The Launderers)
1969
brass
133 x 90 x 57 cm / 52 3/8 x 35 3/8 x 22 1/2 in
© Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milan
Courtesy The Estate of Fausto Melotti y Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Jean-Pierre Maurer
‘Maisons Fragiles’ at Hauser & Wirth London Hauser & Wirth London draws together the work of nine artists in ‘Maisons Fragiles’, a group exhibition exploring themes of fragility, vulnerability and protection as they manifest in a variety of guises. 11 December 2015 – 6 February 2016.]]>
Source: Hauser & Wirth London
Spanning 60 years of artistic practice, the exhibition includes work by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Isa Genzken, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Gordon Matta-Clark, Fausto Melotti and Richard Serra. These artists share an innate sympathy towards architecture and a common preoccupation with materiality; each exploits the properties of their chosen materials – whether that be reflection, transparency or malleability – in pursuit of a mastery of form and space.
Louise Bourgeois and Roni Horn deal with notions of psychological fragility, as they explore fluctuating mental states, fluid definitions of identity, the subjectivity of memory and the precarious nature of human relationships. Bourgeois’s art inextricably entwines personal experience and artistic expression – much of the imagery and materials she used can be traced to her own life, particularly to the experience of childhood traumas and the fraught terrain of femininity. ‘Maisons Fragiles’ (1978), the work that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, confronts the deeply repressed issues that conditioned Bourgeois’s youth, and represents an exploration of the artist’s psyche. For Bourgeois, architecture functioned as a personification of the human condition. The perceived frailty of ‘Maisons Fragiles’ comments on the dialectical tension that exists between interior and exterior – the legs of the sculpture evoke the parameters of a house, while the empty interior speaks to the solitude of domestic life. Despite their fragile appearance, the structures are rendered in steel, endowing them with a strength and resilience that appears, at first glance, to be lacking. Although balanced precariously, the work’s frail appearance is only an illusion.
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