This Electa book accompanies the “A Bridge to the Desert” exhibition featuring RENN’s “The Lone Stone Men” project, presented in the Namibia Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
In 2014, sculptures made of desert stone and iron rods began to populate one of the remotest and least polluted places on Earth, the north-west part of the Namib desert. These human-like sculptures are the work of RENN and have been nicknamed “The Lone Stone Men of the Desert”. Despite being one person, RENN adopts the plural to avoid any personal connotations – including that of gender – and focus the attention solely on the works. “Art Before Artist” sums up this choice, which exalts the Artist-Work-Onlooker relationship. RENN is also those who look at RENN’s work because RENN sees a work as a structure, a receptacle into which onlookers can each insert and read their own interpretations.
Featuring a remarkable photographic dossier also produced by RENN, the catalogue records the stratified artistic operation. As a whole, the statues and surrounding landscape can be interpreted as a vast single work along the lines of Land Art, wherein the manipulation of the landscape is less physical and more the result of the conceptual impact of the sculptures on the natural context. The dunes, rocks and withered trees on which the works are positioned, along with the boundless desert horizon, form an integral part of the work, pushing it beyond the boundaries of the site-specific definition. Not a dialogue between a context and a work but the inalienable organic unity of landscape and work, such to suggest a new definition: that of “Desert Art”.
Bilingual: Italian/English.
€ 22,00