This exhibition featured a shipping container placed in a gallery smaller than the object itself. To fit, it had to be inserted diagonally so all eight points of the prism were in contact with the different parts of the gallery: the walls, the floor and the ceiling.
The Moderno gallery thus became a new ‘container’. As though parodying the idea of Russian dolls, the author sought to drive the idea of the museum and the architecture out of the minds of visitors so as to make the gallery a vessel for a Concrete-style sculpture with which it competed to achieve harmony.
As the artist says: “They are important ways in, the colour blue compared to the white background, the problem of scale and the relationship between the person, the object and the space. They are all symbols designed to lead the spectator… to take them by the hand, lead them into the woods and let them go.”
Container, which was first presented at the Lucerne Art Museumnin Switzerland, in early 2013, focuses on an urban, industrial context establishing a relationship with the projects by Luciana Lamothe and ABTE previously presented at the Moderno, as though asking questions about art and the relationship between form, colour and space. The container is a metaphor for arrival and departure, the local and the global, transit and movement.
A container wedged inside a room might be a representation of discomfort or the impossible but also a reflection on a museum’s need to expand and adapt.
Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963) graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “Prilidiano Pueyrredón” as a Teacher of Painting in 1987. He began exhibiting in 1984 and in 1987 founded the Grupo de la X together with other artists of his generation. In 1992 he won an award from the Fundación Konex and the following year the Premio Braque for Sculpture. He has represented Argentina at several different Biennials: Havana (2000); Istanbul; Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2003); São Paulo (2004) and Venice (2005), as well as being a special guest in the show in the Italian pavilion in the last Biennale.
