One year after the untimely death of Sven Sachsalber (Silandro, 08.05.1987 - Vienna, 12.12.2020), Museion remembers the South Tyrolean artist with the exhibition of the installation “Hands” from the Collection, and announces an ambitious research project on the artist’s entire oeuvre, conducted in close collaboration with his family. The project, supported by the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, will start at the beginning of 2022. The work ‘Hands’ will be on display in the museum foyer from 10 December to 9 January 2022. Born in Silandro and raised in South Tyrol, Sachsalber has made a name for himself on the international art scene with videos, book projects and paintings, but above all with his famous performances that are subtly poetic and close to the absurd.
The research project
Aware of the local and international importance of the artist, Museion will therefore launch a vast project to research, conserve and valorise his work. In an initial phase, the project will reconstruct Sachsalber’s work through the mapping and scientific cataloguing of his works, especially in South Tyrol, as well as through the dense network of local, national and international contacts that have characterised and made his career so distinctive. For this important work, any collaboration and help from those who knew the artist and have one of his works or documentary material is invaluable: in this sense, Museion launches an appeal and asks you to get in touch with the head of the Collection Elena Bini by writing to collection@museion.it
The work “Hands” in the foyer
The work “Hands”, presented in the museum’s foyer and part of the Museion Collection, is the result of a performative action staged by Sven Sachsalber at the White Columns gallery in New York City. For the duration of the exhibition, from 6 to 30 November 2015, the artist and his father Markus Licata put together the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle of Michelangelo’s famous fresco the “Creation of Adam” painted for the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The public could witness the meticulous work of father and son, who continued the undertaking even when the exhibition space was closed. The puzzle, which remained unfinished, consisted of 13200 pieces. It was a four-handed work, repeating the iconic divine creative gesture painted by Michelangelo - the artist thus emphasised both the peculiar relationship between father and son and its universality.
The relationship with his father was a central theme of Sachsalber’s solo show in Museion in 2014, also entitled “Hands”. Elements such as obsessive repetition, the reference to art history and the constant relationship with personal history are typical of Sachsalber’s work, of which the sculptural and performative aspects are particularly characteristic. The aspect of time, physical endurance and giving substance to the absurd also emerges in many of his other performances - the most famous include ‘Finding a needle in a haystack’, staged in 2014 at the Palais de Tokyo, in which the artist literally had to find a needle among piles of straw in 48 hours, or ‘Curon’, in 2012, in which Sachsalber rowed around the bell tower of Lake Reschen in South Tyrol for 24 hours, using only the strength of his arms.
