Raffaella Cortese is pleased to present In Between: a Michael Fliri and Asta Gröting show. This exhibition continues the series of double solo shows characterising the gallery’s current approach: the shows are collaborations in which two artists from different generations, in this case bonded by mutual consideration and affection, discuss issues related to their personal research.
After various residencies in Antwerp and Paris and important assignments such as the video for the façade of the Museion in Bolzano and the performance at the Centre Pompidou, Michael Fliri returns to Milan to meet his former teacher at Munich’s Art Academy: Asta Gröting.
Gröting (Herford 1961), an accomplished sculptor, film-maker and performer whose research is based on the analysis of human behaviour and on the importance of language (as proved by the relevance she gives to the title of her works), has accepted the invitation to engage with her former student in a conversation filled with references and reflections that give rise to unexpected analogies.
The works of Fliri and Gröting will investigate the concept of space as an expressive means in sculpture, performance and video, but will also undertake a broader reflection on the duality full-empty, positive-negative and human-artificial.
Michael Fliri, who is renowned for his videos which are both ironic and melancholic, now reveals a more sombre and disturbing side of his work, which already emerged during the show Behind the Fourth Wall at the Generali Foundation in Vienna. For the first time in our gallery, he will present a very intense performance in which the human body merges with an artificial element, the only part openly interacting with the public, which moves as if it were true creating a mysterious and very tense atmosphere.
The mass of the body used by the artist in the performance is the perfect juxtaposition to Asta’s I/Work made with leather coats laying on the ground it enhances the void which is an evocation of the absence of a body.
The young artist from Alto Adige will also exhibit a large sculpture specially conceived for the gallery space. Its shapes and volumes will dialogue with the cavity of the anatomic casts in Gröting’s Space Between Two People Having Sex.
The 2005 Asta Gröting video, shadow, shows the disappearing shadow of an invisible person, the artist dressed as Frederick the Great. It is related to the great sculpture of the youngest artist and it plays with the evoked presence of the body.