Giovanni Morbin: Lievità / Lightness

Starting with the opening night on Saturday, November 3 until Friday, December 7, 2018 at blank, Giovanni Morbin, an Italian artist and performer endowed with a very rare personality and artistic quality, will present some works, almost all of them new, that have been chosen according to an exhibition project on the issues of relief (in Italian, ‘sgravio’, i.e., literally, the opposite of gravity) and lightness, that changes into levitation. The works belong to different moments of his artistic path (the most distant in time, L’appeso / The Hanging, was made in 1979, and the most recent, Mi arrendo! / I give up!, in 2014-2016) so as to signify the strong centrality of these themes in this author’s research right from the start.
Morbin has already collaborated with e/static with several performative projects, the first of which was Lid in 2010, then in 2014 with his participation in the Killing Floor project, and again in 2016, within the La collera delle lumache / The Snails' Wrath project. And there is a video, Rock and Roll, produced by e/static in 2017, which documents his ‘outdoor’ action of the previous year created in the context of The Snails’ Wrath. This will be his first personal exhibition with e/static, and his first ever in Turin.

A pupil of Emilio Vedova at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, and always a great admirer of Marcel Duchamp, Giovanni Morbin soon abandoned the practice of painting, finding his expressive dimension above all in performance, a territory that he has explored tirelessly without ever specializing in a single mode, and where each time he creates something new that always manages to surprise the audience by eluding their expectations, In his own words, «I never try the action before I perform it. I want to be in the same condition as the audience. A virgin with regard to its verification». It can also be said that a recurring figure in his actions is that of physical resistance in the reiteration of a gesture or in the indefinite maintenance of a position, often in very difficult conditions. Similarly to his performative actions, as regards the visual and installation aspects of his work, one of the peculiar qualities of this author is his ability to never repeat himself, and each time the techniques used are different, even if a greater frequency can be found, above all, in his use of the photographic medium and of video.