NB: ANNA AMADIO / VITTORIO SANTORO
The abbreviation NB refers to the exhibition series of the same name organised by the Federal Office of Culture, which emerged in 1997 from the two federal studio grants in New York and Berlin. Before these prestigious grants fell victim to the federal government’s austerity measures last year, Anna Amadio (*1963) and Vittorio Santoro (*1962) were able to benefit from them one last time in 2005. They lived and worked in New York and Berlin respectively for a year. Following their return to Switzerland, the two artists are now presenting new works at the Kunstmuseum Thun.
Anna Amadio is exhibiting her latest large-format drawings using the frottage technique and has developed a three-dimensional work specifically for the museum’s premises. The artist, who lives in Basel and Cologne, has made a name for herself with her drawings and room-filling installations, initially conceived as inflatable, transparent objects. Today she works primarily with vacuum technology, extracting the air from oversized foil structures so that the structure of the elements within them becomes visible.
In both her drawings and her installation, Anna Amadio draws on the architectural structures of the metropolis. For the works presented in Thun, the artist drew inspiration in New York from building façades, open-plan offices and the hustle and bustle of the streets. Within the coloured lines of her drawings *On the Two Corners* (2005), one can make out figures, rows of houses and street corners. With her vacuum sculpture Lips Inc. (2006), Anna Amadio develops an urban landscape based on work cubicles. From standardised office furniture, an architectural space emerges beneath the vacuum-sealed plastic sheets, situated between standardised blocks of flats and individual character.
Under the title Everything’s Not Lost, Vittorio Santoro brings together various conceptual works that explore human sensibility. Detached from autobiographical references, he examines structures of perception, interpretation and attribution. At the Kunstmuseum Thun, he is exhibiting his new work Moving Towards You, Moving Around You, Moving Against You, Moving Away From You (2005), a filmic piece that unsettles the viewer with three varying conclusions. Vittorio Santoro’s spatial installations and works on paper refer to concepts such as curiosity, instinct, responsibility, doubt, power and melancholy. The audience is explicitly challenged when a neon sign asks “What proves you are here?” and a voice in the same room says “What proves you are not here?” (AN/ÄSTHESIE; 2005), or when, in the installation Swinging Doors (2006), a small garden door unexpectedly reacts to the movements of the visitors.
