The sixth solo exhibition by Alberto Garutti (Galbiate, 1948 – Milan, 2023) at Galleria Massimo Minini in Brescia—fifty years after the first one [1] —brings together a selection of works and archive materials, chosen and curated by Studio Archivio Alberto Garutti aiming to present to the public two firmly intertwined themes central to the practice of the Milanese artist: first, the landscape as a site of the present—a set, simple and complex at once, made up of actual facts, nature, urbanity, and the society to which we belong—and, second, the gaze, the act of looking as the main driving force of the artistic process.

“I have considered the observation of nature—of looking up, observing the landscape and its distances, losing one’s sense of scale or the distances between things—as a form of immersion. I view the 2026idea of losing myself in nature, and belonging to it and the things that surround us, as an exploratory approach, but also as an extension of that critical feeling that has matured in me over the years, when I looked on the artist as a figure capable of producing reality, and not just its representation.” [2].

The show starts outside the gallery with Opera dedicata a chi alzerà lo sguardo [Work dedicated to those who will raise their gaze] (2015): a light blue vertical flag stands out in the sky, with a large caption reporting the title. The work, commissioned to Garutti and other artists in 2015 to celebrate the opening of the LAC in Lugano, is part of a series of works whose theme—always central to Garutti’s practice—is to give the viewer’s gaze a sense of empowerment. An invitation to “look at reality; to make their own critical way of looking at things” [3].

Once inside the gallery, the first room houses Alba giorno sera notte [Dawn day evening night] (1998): work composed by hundred coloured incandescent light bulbs arranged in a semicircle on the floor. Controlled by an electrical panel, the lights gradually vary in intensity, recreating inside the room the chromatisms of the sky during the different phases of the day. The work was carefully revised and remodelled in Garutti’s studio in the last years of his life and is on display here for the first time since 1998.
Painstakingly conceived and calibrated by the artist as a pictorial work on backgrounds, reverberations, reflections and chromatic nuances of the sky, Alba giorno sera notte is a work to be enjoyed at a slow pace, reflecting on the value of time, on the seamless merging of an endless series of fleeting moments. The work anticipates by a few years the themes of the more recent Accedere al presente [Access to the present] (2014-2020)—exhibited in this very same room in 2021 on the occasion of the artist’s last solo show in the gallery—about which the artist stated: “The slow progression of the colors is a silent narrative of imaginary places or spaces, but also a means of access to all the present moments of our lives. The work invites the viewer
to observe it for a long while; it is a mechanical and poetic representation of the encounter between time and the act of looking, between memory and imagination”.

The act of looking and the possibility of constructing a gaze are the themes that run through the archive material displayed in the second room.
A small painting by architect Antonio Cassi Ramelli (1905-1980), donated by Cassi Ramelli to the Garutti family and carefully kept—as well as restored—by the artist in the last years of his life, depicts a lake landscape evocative of the places of his childhood. It is no coincidence that the painting’s palette has an almost direct relationship with the colours of many of Garutti’s works, among which Accedere al presente.
The painting is accompanied by four texts, written by Garutti in 1992 as part of the project “Arte e architettura. Interventi in un quartiere della periferia milanese”. The texts arise from the artist’s desire to suggest images through writing: descriptions of landscapes, transpositions into text of what could be seen, beyond the domestic walls, looking out from the inside, through the windows of each of the houses where he lived throughout his life.

The second and third rooms are linked by the presence of two benches, fragments of the public work Il cane qui ritratto appartiene a una delle famiglie di Trivero. Quest’opera è dedicata a loro e alle persone che sedendosi qui ne parleranno [The dog shown here belongs to one of the families of Trivero. This work is dedicated to those dogs and to the people who will sit here and talk about them] (2009), created on the occasion of “All’aperto”, curated by Andrea Zegna and Barbara Casavecchia for Fondazione Zegna. The grit-concrete benches on view at the exhibition, surmounted by two sculptural portraits of dogs from the Trivero community, are two artist’s proofs out of the twelve still located throughout the area around Biella. Conceived to spread through time and space through different narratives and dialogue, the work explores the relationship between social and natural landscapes: local residents identify with the work, using it and turning it into a relational device, becoming at once spectators and clients. The work thus responds to Garutti’s intent to conceive “public works that may not have been thought of as art, but which ambiguously belong to the ‘background,’ to the reality around us.” [4].
The bench—a recurring subject and theme in Garutti’s work—is a tool that not only fosters encounters and dialogue, but also gives the viewer the chance to observe reality and the landscape, whether in a public space or in the rooms of a gallery. In the Trivero project, the shape of the benches is a direct reference to the one designed in the early 1960s by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, his university professors at Politecnico di Milano, for the first line of the Milan underground.

The process of uncontrolled propagation and dissemination of the artwork is a theme that Garutti reflects on in the context of many of his public works. What his work in Trivero and Storie d’amore [Love stories] (2002), on view in room three, have in common are the artist’s reflections on the concept of “positive gossip”, on spread as a natural, almost biological, fact: “I was interested in producing a work that was somehow self-generating, for which I only needed to “light the fuse” and then just describe its progression […]” [5].
In this photographic work, originated on the occasion of a project curated by Zerynthia, some spaces within the Sant’Andrea Hospital in Rome—apparently anonymous and devoid of all human presence—take on a new poetic value: these are the places where love stories between employees of the facility began. Garutti made use of the circulating power of gossip to trigger a mechanism capable of getting the entire hospital community involved, creating a work which “springs from and constructs its sense on a connective tissue, formed by a dense network of information thanks to the complicity of numerous people. […] The meetings between people set the process in motion and are at the same time its integral part. The photographs are works and simultaneously tools to construct the invisible loom of places and of looking that make up the life of the building.” [6].

The exhibition ends with a room dedicated to the Specchi forati [Perforated mirrors], a series of works begun in the 1990s and continuing till 2023. On these reflective surfaces, the artist made holes in an attempt to capture a gaze: the holes form the silhouette of the objects observed in a certain place at a certain moment. The works become windows where the artist’s gaze abstracts itself, opening up to new perspectives and transforming the intimate, domestic landscape into an impulse directed elsewhere: “I am fascinated by the idea that my present and my memory can merge with those of the viewer and the passerby, and that this memory, synthesized in the mirror in a fragile, interpretable form, can become a generator of new narratives in the eyes of another—an infinite multitude of observers.”

[1] “Alberto Garutti”, galleria Banco, Brescia, 1976
[2] Alberto Garutti, “Nature”, in Studio Celant (curated by), Alberto Garutti, a+mbookstore / Hatje Cantz, Milan / Berlin, 2024.
[3] Alberto Garutti, “Spectator”, cit.
[4] Alberto Garutti, “Method”, cit.
[5] Alberto Garutti, “Others”, cit.
[6] Alberto Garutti in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, in “Domus”, n. 901, March 2007.