BOLZANO.- The Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano, «I just don’t like eggs!» Andrea Fraser on collectors, collecting, collections is the first solo exhibition ever devoted by an Italian institution to the research of artist, writer and thinker Andrea Fraser (USA, 1965).

Curated by Andrea Viliani with Vittoria Pavesi, the exhibition is the first survey solely dedicated to Fraser’s works investigating collectors, collecting, the art market, and the intersections between private and public collections. The project includes works spanning the artist’s overall research, from the late 80s to her recent productions, including a new artwork especially conceived for this exhibition. Taken from the script of Fraser’s performance May I Help You?, the title «I just don’t like eggs!» evokes the language and mentality of collecting as an enactment of taste, desire, distinction, possession, categorization, negation, exclusivity, and the exercise of choice as an expression of power.

One of the most radical and influential artists of her generation, Fraser's pioneering work in institutional critique investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural organizations, fields, groups, and individuals. Performatively embodying the data that she generates through her research, Fraser’s practice is as physical and affective as it is critical and intellectual, working through humor and pathos as well as analysis. Her discursive practice employs staged discussions, performative actions, scripts, data, and museum incursions as devices to shift the art system’s standards and to critically redefine our relations to them. The artist’s sociological and psychoanalytic approach becomes the lens for questioning the art world and highlighting its contradictions, projections, wills, and wishes.

The frame of the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare – a non-profit institution that stemmed from a private collection with a focus on mostly Western lines of research, such as the Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and Minimal Art – represents the starting point for an exhibition that analyzes the very concept of art as a commodity and the layered and often contradictory dynamics of ownership between artists and collectors while exposing the structural connections between the art market and wealth concentration, as well as between art and politics. Fraser’s exhibition represents the opportunity to re-conceptualize culture, class, privilege, and their systemic institutionalization, and to re-think our positions in the art field by re-imagining structures and relations within it.

Beginning in the Foundation's entrance, intended for the reception of visitors, the exhibition develops mainly in the ground floor's Commission Room. It then occupies and infiltrates other areas of the institution - sometimes as a hyper-text, sometimes as a meta-exhibition - including the collection galleries, the library, the halls and corridors, and the outdoor courtyard. «I just don't like eggs!» unfolds in space to mirror the works it contains, namely as a critical analysis and narrative unveiling of the mechanics of the art system. This also defines the institution itself that contains it, its collection, its architectural spaces, its programme and its practical functions.

Andrea Fraser was born in Billings, Montana (USA, 1965) and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of the Arts and Architecture. Her artworks has been exhibited in solo exhibitions, amongst many others, at: the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2022); the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, PA, USA and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (2021); the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (both in 2016); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien, Austria (2012); and at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2010). Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain, and MUAC UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2015); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2013), and at the Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany (2003). In 1993 she represented Austria in the 45th Venice Biennale alongside Christian Philipp Müller and Gerwald Rockenschaub. She participated in the 1993 and 2012 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, the 1998 and 2021 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, Prospect 3 New Orleans in 2014, and the 12th Shanghai Biennale in 2018. Her project 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018) was named the best art book of the decade by ARTnews. Fraser was the recipient of numerous awards, including: the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2017); the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna, Austria (2015); the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Cologne, Germany (2013); the Anonymous was a Woman Fellowship, New York, NY (2012); the Art Matters Inc. Fellowship, New York, NY(1996-1997, 1990-1991, 1987-1988); the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship (1991-1992); and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award, New York, NY(1990-1991).