The core of the exhibition project is a selection of textile works from the last decade of the artist’s production and includes never seen before works. Included among the more than twenty pieces, are Teatro and Teatrino (2013), with formal arrangements tracing to traditions within stage architecture, and Oranjegekte, Follia Arancione! (2023).
The itinerary culminates with Meccanismi di Precisione per Sculture (2022), a series in which fragments of fabric are suspended in open cases—a display strategy that laminates the exhibition space as part of the artwork.
Born in Timisoara to parents of Hungarian origin, Baruch grew up in an unstable political and social environment, Stalinism and Fascism were backdrop ideologies that profoundly marked her education, her poetics and her artistic trajectory. Since childhood, she has found refuge in art, drawing every day even as a war exile in the Romanian countryside. An inclination towards painting first led her to Bucharest, then to Jerusalem, where she studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. It was during a scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome that she explored the artistic vocabularies that concluded her formal education.
In the 1970s she returned to Italy, settling in Gallarate, where along with architect Carlo Moretti she conceived the modernist villa in which she lived for decades. This experience brought her closer to the world of design and sculpture. From 1993 until 2010 Baruch lived in Paris, where she devoted herself to projects also connected to relational art. In 2010 she returned to Italy.
Since 2012, Baruch has been focusing her artistic research exclusively on textiles and by extension on the regions’ historical links to the textile industry. It is here in Gallarate where Marion Baruch has returned to live permanently.
Using fabric remnants from prêt-à-porter fashion houses, scraps otherwise destined to be destroyed, Baruch codifies a language through the alternation of shapes, colors, matter and emptiness. Except for compositional gestures and a reliance on gravity, Baruch does not modify. Rather, she chooses to minimize without concealing. The void affirms itself as one of the poetic focal points: an active space that contains potential. Just as happened in Paris in 2009 with the Une Chambre Vide project: Baruch completely emptied out a room in her flat where she organized a series of meetings in which different people could sit down, exchange ideas, opinions and observe the alternation of the plage du soleil and the plage de la lune on the parquet floor and, framed by the window, the continuous transformations of the sky.
Baruch’s life-long fascination with textiles has characterized her entire artistic production. This can also be interpreted in relation to the post-war industrial transformation that she witnessed. By challenging our habits of over-consumption and the industrial production of waste, her work reveals the feeble allure of hidden, often invisible, leftovers. By choosing not to intervene on the fabrics, Baruch celebrates their past while revealing the incessant work that has transformed them. By questioning and simultaneously appreciating the production cycle of the fashion industry, vis-à-vis the art world, social and cultural themes find layered meaning in Baruch’s works. They link together different historical and artistic periods while confirming a trait—that of being an artist of the present—a hallmark of her entire poetics.
“I feel at home everywhere and with everyone,” declares the artist.
Baruch, who grew up in a melting pot of cultures and who is polyglot, feels at home among many languages. This is clear in the act of titling her artworks: whether they are in German, Italian, English or French—such as Schwerkraft (2018), Attraverso lo specchio (2018) and Bird (2016). The titles she assigns are evocations of memory, multi-layered puns that reveal and reflect on the nature of compositions, impressions of colors and form condensed into haikus, often images difficult to translate. In the passage from one idiom to another, some part is always lost. It is in the combination of artworks and words that emerges one of Art’s prerogatives: enabling a dialogue between people, cultures and languages. Baruch connects the tangible with the intangible as to arrange a poetic composed of unintentional but impetuous beauty.
at Viasaterna, Milan
until March 22, 2024