The Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, DARC - Direzione generale per l’architettura e l’arte contemporanee and the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia are glad to present, within the framework of the 52nd International Art Exhibition, the new Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale, hosting, under Ida Gianelli’s supervision, two works created for this venue: Sculture di linfa by Giuseppe Penone and Democrazy by Francesco Vezzoli.

Announced in the Spring of 2005, the new Italian Pavilion made its debut in the Autumn of 2006 within the 10th International Architecture Exhibition and this year, for the first time in the largest and most important contemporary art review, it will represent one of the main novelties in the 52nd Venice Biennale Exhibition.

The Pavilion layout has been assigned to curator Ida Gianelli, Director of the Rivoli Castle Contemporary Art Museum, who has chosen to represent today’s Italian artistic milieu with works created for this occasion by artists Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, Cuneo, 1947) and Francesco Vezzoli (Brescia, 1971). “Although these two artists belong to different generations and despite the difference between their languages 　 Ida Gianelli explains 　 they are both contemporary art protagonists and express the deepness and richness of contemporaneity”.

Pio Baldi, Director of DARC and Italian Pavilion Commissioner, stresses that “the prestigious choice of an internationally known curator as Gianelli and the fruitful co-operation with the Biennale di Venezia Foundation in the Italian Pavilion project, started as early as in 2006, are significant results of the efforts made by these institutions in order to give Italian contemporary art relevant visibility and spaces equal to those granted to the other countries attending the 52nd International Exhibition”. Pio Baldi also wishes to thank UniCredit Group for the support given to DARC in the organization of the Italian Pavilion.

Davide Croff, President of the Fondazione la Biennale di Venezia, has declared: “Besides solving the anomalous absence of a specific space dedicated to Italian art within the International Art Exhibition, the new Italian Pavilion represents a fundamental stage in the new forward-looking Biennale’s project, both as regards its programmes and the long-term renovation of its premises”.

The new Italian Pavilion (covering about 1,000 square metres in a 19th Century coal storehouse) will host both installations, with great differences in the artists’ poetics and media use, alongside with a free visitors’ route.

Giuseppe Penone’s Sculture di linfa is an installation developed for this venue, consisting of large wood and marble sculptures as well as of drawings. The artist describes it thus: “Spaces covered by hands, spaces emptied by hands. The sculpture space is filled with lymph. The hand flux flows on the tree rind, revealing the form of wood and the veins of marble”.

Francesco Vezzoli is the author of the new video installation DEMOCRAZY: “Taking my cue from the forthcoming 2008 presidential elections in the U.S. 　 the artist explains 　, this project consists in the production of a proper electoral campaign, proposing the Venice Biennale public a confrontation between two hypothetical candidates to one of the most important offices in the world.

Two electoral ads, produced in co-operation with two “media advisors” teams 　 with U.S. politics professionals led by Mark McKinnon (first counsellor in George Bush’s 2004 electoral campaign) and Bill Knapp (Bill Clinton’s spokesman in the 1996 race to the White House) respectively 　 will oppose two identities, two different political and human “visions”, highlighting the fatal strategies in electoral communication and raising questions about the way fame, media power and truth manipulation can distort the meaning of the word ‘democracy’”.