KARLSRUHE.- The ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art frequently holds presentations of artists who have been ignored or forgotten by the mainstream and art market in loose series. In many cases, these artists have provided important impulses in contemporary art. In this context, the work of Italian multi-media artist Gianfranco Baruchello is being presented in a showcase running till March 29, 2015. The exhibition is co-curated by Andreas Beitin and Peter Weibel. The exhibition, jointly organized with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg/ Sammlung Falckenberg, not only offers an overview of over half a century of art production, but also the sheer versatility of Baruchello’s work, an artist who over several decades produced a substantial oeuvre of pictures, sculptures, object cabinets, collages, texts as well as films.

Gianfranco Baruchello (born in 1924 in Livorno), was a member of the European avant-garde during the 1960s. Driven by his natural scientific inclinations, he sought points of unity at the interface of art and man, life and matter. In Baruchello’s work such moments of fusion occur in a broad range of media, coming to expression no less in his founding a rural commune inspired by Joseph Beuys’ idea of “social plastic”.

Much like Marcel Duchamp, with whom he was a close friend Baruchello was drawn early on to the use of found forms and colors, the objets trouvé. Here, he went beyond Duchamp, not only connecting, but also creating abstract works from found objects, the fusion of the autonomous parts of which, in turn, gave rise to extraordinary forms. He connected the strategies of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art – about which he became fascinated during his travels through America (1964) – with his own compositions, thereby creating a markedly individual pictorial language: on canvasses with white grounding, he created an entire world of different figures and symbols, also called “characters”, which he connected to a network resembling a neuronal system.

Alongside his work with language expressed in the form of puns, rhyme experiments and the shaping of individual and special publications (e.g. Mi viene in mente, 1966), Baruchello then found his way to the medium of film. He produced his first Super8 film Il grado zero del paessagio in 1963. In 1964, he produced his first 16mm film Verifica incerta, assembled from ‘found´ scenes. Working with video camera became increasingly important for him over time. Above all, the processing of the medium and media content shifted to the foreground from around 1970 onwards – as for example the work Foto piccolissime representing the arbitrary and massively reduced photographs of the German television program.

The founding of his own artists association, the Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., in 1973, was only one of the logical steps of Baruchello’s ongoing ecological concerns following his participation in various international artists’ groups (E.A.T., Artiflex). With the aim of finally unifying art and life, and of cultivating land, he created a synergetic dovetailing of art, agriculture and animal husbandry by founding an artists’ farm, and thus took several greater steps than many other artists of his time whose intentions, though similar, remained in the sphere of theory.