BOLZANO.- Sixty years after the landmark exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, held in 1966 at New York’s Jewish Museum, the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation is proud to present a new exhibition project that aims to celebrate and historically reconsider the legacy of Minimalism and its influence on contemporary art through a selection of works from the Collection. This new exhibition is curated by Eva Brioschi.

Curated by Kynaston McShine, the 1966 exhibition established artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt, introducing a new concept of sculpture based on formal reduction, seriality and objectivity. Primary Structures / Multiple Systems analyses how this geometric alphabet has been absorbed, transformed and ultimately “compromised” by successive generations of artists, thereby becoming a tool for deciphering the complex systems of contemporary reality.

One the central idea behind ​​Minimalism was that a work should not express anything beyond itself: an object exists only in its physical presence, and the artist is no longer the demiurge who shapes the material, but rather a designer of structures. This shift marked the definitive departure from traditional sculpture in favour of so-called specific objects. The use of cold industrial materials such as fibreglass, steel and neon combined with the outsourcing of production to factories or external craftsmen led to the separation of conceptual intuition from manual execution. Even canvases were reduced to an elementary geometric form, on which colour should represent nothing other than flatness and their own chromatic surfaces as perceived by the viewer.

This new aesthetic model, founded on detachment, the anonymity of the artist and the pure perception of volume in space, introduces a different conception of works of art. That task is accomplished in the encounter between object, space and viewer, whose physical and perceptual experience varies with the movement of the body. This relationship is best expressed in Frank Stella's famous assertion that “what you see is what you see”.

The real forerunner of this questioning of the figure of the author and the desacralisation of the artistic object — compared to an industrial product and understood as a residue of the creative process — was Marcel Duchamp decades earlier. One key historical fact that confirms this contiguity is the essay The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes which was published for the first time in English in the box-magazine Aspen and is on display in the Foundation's library. Barthes knew that his essay would take its place alongside Duchamp’s famous lecture, The Creative Act, which foreshadowed this new perspective.

The exhibition unfolds across several spaces from the ground floor (including the Black Box) to the first floor, following a path that connects the public and private realms. This dualism reflects the very statute of the Foundation, simultaneously both an exhibition space and also home to the Collection. Bringing together international artists including Andrea Fraser, Fabio Mauri, Mario Garc�a Torres, James Turrell and Nairy Baghramian, the project expands the boundaries of minimalist language through practices that question institutions, memory, identity, ecology and systems of power in an interweaving of light, space, time and social critique.

The contemporary artists in the exhibition have deliberately chosen to violate this historic indifference, appropriating the seemingly innocent modules of Minimalism and transforming them into critical devices loaded with political, social and institutional tensions. In doing so, they are demonstrating that in our current reality, no structure can be considered neutral or isolated from the real world.

Primary Structures / Multiple Systems highlights how the essential forms of the past are now tools for interpreting the complexity of the present. The exhibition invites viewers to come to terms not only with the physical presence of objects in space, but also with the material, political, technological, visible and invisible infrastructures in which we are immersed and with which we interact daily, often unconsciously. From this perspective, the reactivation of history appears as an essential critical exercise for understanding and inhabiting the architectures, algorithms and systems that shape our present and prefigure those of the future.

Curated by Eva Brioschi.