kaufmann repetto is pleased to present The BFG, a group exhibition comprised of works by Robert Breer, Franco Mazzucchelli, Shimabuku, and Franz Erhard Walther. The exhibition is titled after Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel of the same name, an acronym for ‘The Big Friendly Giant’. The artists within the exhibition work in ways that distort and contradict conventions of the monumental, be it through sheer physicality or by evoking a sense of wonder through shifts in everyday perspectives and phenomena.

Rather than imposing a static, monolithic presence, the works on view deny durability and identification with a concrete form and position. Instead, these works relate to the environment as they adapt to it, instilling a sense of familiarity that transforms the viewer’s relationship with the site itself.

The works on view within The BFG subvert authoritarian themes of control and conditioning by offering viewers opportunities of engagement and participation, whereby an awareness of not fitting in serves as reminder to appreciate, embrace and consider even the most improbable of everyday encounters.

Robert Breer (b. 1926, Detroit, MI – 2011, Tucson, AZ) was an experimental filmmaker and artist who worked in a multidisciplinary manner utilizing painting, sculpture, and installation-based practices. Both his films and his sculptures disrupted the concepts of linear narratives in art-making and ideas about figure-ground relationships. His mechanized Floats are considered to have tested these conventions of fixed sculptural works and their relationships to the laws of space. Breer was interested in the ways in which these works behaved independently to outside control; when prohibited of navigating in one direction, the works redirect themselves in the opposite. Retrospectives and solo exhibitions of Breer’s works have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; CAPC, Bordeaux; and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; among others. A Float by Robert Breer is currently installed within MoMA’s sculpture garden.

Franco Mazzucchelli (b. 1939, Milan, IT) lives and works in Milan. Since the 1970’s, Mazzucchelli has been creating inflatable sculptures, like the one on view, typically with the intentions to place and abandon the works in public, outdoor environments. These unannounced works would shift the familiarities with the given site by various passersby; often calling to attention and into action the intervention of various societal roles – the police may destroy the piece, while children may play upon it; others may take them away, stray from their typical paths in avoidance of the strange and potentially threatening object, while others may simply marvel it. What typically remains thereafter, in the sculpture’s absence, are photographs and videos captured by the artist, serving as evidence of the altered, inhabited environment, as it once was and as it is now. Mazzucchelli’s works have been included in historical exhibitions including the 15th Milan Triennale (1973), the 37th Venice Biennale (1976) and the 11th Rome Quadrennial (1986). Earlier this year (2018), the Museo del Novecento, Milan, presented an exhibition of Mazzucchelli’s works conceived between the mid 1960’s and the end of the 1970’s. Mazzucchelli was professor of Techniques of Sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.