The Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, together with the Centraal Museum of Utrecht, devotes a major monographic exhibition to the work of Craigie Horsfield, a British artist who has developed often influential ideas of social relation and “slow” time, as well as outstanding research into the nature of the photographic image itself. Portraits, still lifes, moments from everyday life, rites of passage and ideas concerning society and individuals, being and relation are the recurring themes explored in his work, using innovative techniques that erase the boundaries between the various artistic disciplines. In fact, photography is just one of the many overlapping genres in this artist’s oeuvre. Starting from a negative or a photo still, Horsfield produces large-scale works made by using a surprisingly wide range of techniques, such as tapestries and frescoes.

The narrative structure of this exhibition evolves through a focus on Horsfield’s most emblematic, often monumental works; for instance, the majestic tapestry depicting the apocalyptic scene at Ground Zero, or the Gulf of Naples with an ambiguous night-time vision. The remarkable trajectory brought about casts light on the relationship between events that transpired in places and moments that are apparently far apart, between the people who took part in them and the viewers discovering the exhibition.
The idea of relation – signifying both the connection between individuals and a narration, a recounting – lies at the very core of Horsfield’s work. This is particularly evidenced in the projects he produced specifically for this exhibition (as he has done over many years throughout Europe, in Naples, Madrid or Barcelona). Since the late 1960s, Craigie Horsfield has made soundworks, structures of discovered sound and music, and here, the exhibition itself is arranged like the movements of a musical composition. Alongside the tapestries, frescoes and prints, the exhibition also includes a new soundwork, an acoustic installation constructed and mixed with his longtime collaborator, the composer and musician, Reinier Rietveld. This sound element exists in conversation with the other works and, like them, contributes to the elaboration of new and specific meanings. The exhibition includes a series of portraits made in Lugano and Utrecht specifically for this project. These images explore the ways in which we understand each other and how we co-exist. At the same time, the images testify to the particularity of the people who work together with the artist, and their singular, unique existence in the present, recognized through the attention of the viewer, in thoughtfulness, sensibility and empathy. It is precisely with this open and generous attitude that the viewers are invited to discover the exhibition.