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"Atrium of the gaze on the future" by Mario Airò, "Red Pavilion" by Alfredo Jaar and "Guardiane" by Kiki Smith are added to the nine works already installed in the park - Photo gallery

Milan, 1 April 2022 – The rich program of inaugurations and initiatives of "Milan Art week 2022", which from 28 March to 3 April involves the entire city and public and private institutions dealing with modern and contemporary art, also offers an important event this year with public art. In fact, three new works of Artline Milano were inaugurated today, the public art project of the Municipality of Milan which develops in the City life park along a complex path of twenty permanent works. These are "Atrium of the gaze on the future" by Mario Airò, "Red Pavilion" by Alfredo Jaar and "Guardiane" by Kiki Smith.

The works of Mario Airò, Alfredo Jaar and Kiki Smith will be added to the first nine site-specific sculptures already installed inside the park and created by the artists Riccardo Benassi, Judith Hopf, Maurizio Nannucci, Adrian Paci, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Wilfredo Prieto, Matteo Rubbi, Pascale Marthine Tayou and Serena Vestrucci.

In addition to the works already installed, those of Rossella Biscotti, Elisabetta Benassi, Jeremy Deller, Shilpa Gupta, Adelita Husni-Bey, Liliana Moro, Otobong Nkanga are being planned.

"An open-air contemporary art exhibition with free and open access: this is Artline, which is increasingly taking shape over time, following the urban growth of the new City Life district – stated the Councilor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi –. The new, beautiful works inaugurated today were designed by the artists precisely for this place, to dialogue with its architecture, its green spaces, the people who frequent it, to help create that genius loci that makes a neighborhood one living and vital space. The twinning between urban regeneration projects and artistic and cultural projects is fundamental for the harmonious development of our city and for the well-being of the community".

"Atrium of the gaze on the future" by Mario Airò (Pavia, 1961) is an underground sculpture, surmounted by an external dome made of bronze and inspired by the so-called "Piacenza liver" or "Etruscan liver" (dating back to the XNUMXnd-XNUMXst century BC ). The artist, overturning the traditional way of understanding this divinatory object, presents it to the viewer as a ceiling that coincides with the celestial vault.

"Atrium of the gaze on the future is an environmental installation inspired by the environmental/spatialist vocation of Milanese avant-garde art – explains Mario Airò –. It takes inspiration from the liver of Piacenza, a small late Etruscan bronze, which served as a map for the reading of the entrails of the sacrificial animal. A celestial map was superimposed on the various parts of the liver and its protuberances, in order to attribute the manifestations present in it to the influence of this or that divinity. The haruspex could thus read the signs and omens for the future. The idea was to combine this ancestral, somewhat chthonic root with a place characterized above all by the vertical momentum of the Three Towers".

"Red Pavilion" by Alfredo Jaar (Santiago de Chile, 1956) welcomes the visitor inside a perfectly cubic space that offers an alternative vision of the context of City life. Through a large red window, the artist invites us to reflect through the transformed image of the surrounding reality.

"Red Pavilion is a frame that brings City life back from a gigantic scale to a more human one – says Alfredo Jaar –, a simple frame that gives the observer an overall vision and the possibility of having everything under control. 'Red Pavilion' offers a space of silence, of meditation, of thought. A space to think about the state of culture and finance of the contemporary world. A space to think about the state of culture and politics of the contemporary world. Red Pavilion is a space of resistance, a space of hope". The architectural design of the work was carried out by AOUMM.

"Guardians" by Kiki Smith (Nuremberg, 1954) presents two bronze sculptures depicting two female cats, placed a short distance from each other. "These cats are two benevolent protectors who guard the neighborhood – underlines Kiki Smith –. Cats are mystical companions who give us joy and comfort. These sacred animals, like many other living creatures, are today perceived as a burden in modern cities. Abandoned for social and economic reasons, they are left without care and exposed to diseases. Often their reproductive organs are destroyed for our convenience. As well as the loss of variety of the plant world, the genetic diversity of animals is also becoming thinner. My work for Artline is inspired by the cats that live in the moat of the Sforzesco Castle."

For further information and details, consult the website artline.