From Christo’s Floating Piers on Italy’s Lake Iseo, to Roberto Cuoghi’s Putiferio installation/performance in Hydra at Projectspace Slaughterhouse, and Katharina Grosse’s Rockaway! installation at Fort Tilden, the idle days of summer are quickly becoming prime territory for art world extravaganzas. So it makes sense that Ibiza is quickly becoming a hub for such programming.
Last August, collector/curator/hotelier Lio Malca opened La Nave Salinas, a former salt warehouse turned 8,000 sq ft exhibition space, with a show of paintings and sculpture by KAWS that was surrounded by highlights from his collection (including works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol).
This summer, Malca is giving the space over to Marco Brambilla. Known primarily for his mesmerising 3D video collages in the elevators of the Standard Highline hotel in New York, La Nave will show the entirety of the artist’s Megaplex trilogy.
’Each piece in the trilogy deals with a specific human narrative,’ says Brambilla, whose epic historical narratives and hyper-saturated tableaux were inspired by Breugel and Bosch. ’I wanted the pieces to test the limits of visual overload, looping and interlacing in a way that confounds the temporal parameters of the moving image.’
For Brambilla, the trilogy works as ’surrogate movie theatre floating within the brick space’. He says, ’I wanted the visitor’s first impression upon entering the space to simultaneously satirise and celebrate the golden era of Hollywood.’
Jenny Holzer took a similar approach with her two-site exhibition, ’Are you alive?’, at Guy Laliberté’s Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza spaces. The galleries display works from the Lune Rouge collection in the winter and stage projects with artists in the collection in the summer, beginning last year with a Blum & Poe curated show from Takashi Murakami. ’We really let the artist decide the pace and the project,’ says director Heather Harmon. ’Jenny really wanted to go out into the landscape and find materials she wanted to experiment with against the architecture of the spaces.’
Inside the Art Projects Ibiza space Holzer installed a group of LED works attached to false walls (with texts running into and out of the wall) and a larger, more dynamic version of her animatronic work, Sworn Statement. And at Lune Rouge, Holzer has a series of footstools made with stones she’s never worked with – Bahia Azul and Labradorite from Madagascar with impacted pearlescent shards – inscribed with the artist’s iconic Truisms.
Meanwhile, Holzer excavated 13 boulders from the island upon which she inscribed lines of verse (in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Catalan) from modernist poets like Hilda Doolittle and Guillaume Apollinaire. ’They all explore modernity and sexuality in phrases about the land and the sea,’ says Harmon. ’Some are in plain sight and those have really incredible views and they really make you observe the landscape. [...] Others are nestled in the middle of pine trees that are more secluded and you can have a more quiet, intimate moment. She wanted people to walk around the property and discover them. It’s almost like a treasure hunt.’
