SANTIAGO SIERRA

POLIURETANO ESPREADO SOBRE 18 PERSONAS

march 16 - may 15, 2002

with a catalogue text by Pierluigi Tazzi

Opening: saturday march 16, 2002 6.30 pm

Exhibition organized in collaboration with "PROMETEO" Association for contemporary art

Santiago Sierra, artist of spanish origin whose interventions have used the basis of the remunerated labor, the concept of salary, as the focal point of his work and basic point of reflections within his artistic manifest.

The artist symbolically adopts the dynamics of the salary to expose the production and economic processes that are the basis of the work of art, making the workers hired to perform, to be part or "support" of the artistic work. The money, within the hierarchic system that Sierra creates, results as being a reading key of today's exhibiting dynamics and of determinant artistic signs, from minimal art to body art.

A line of 250 cms. tatoed on six remunerated people, 68 people remunerated to block a museums entrance, a person remunerated to clean the visitor's shoes without their consent during a gallery opening.

Such interventions consist in priming an action, it can be either a clandestine or represented by an act of vandalism, exposed or represented as an event, or else, he reproposes a normal action shooting down a practical scope and function. As a result the object and work of art disappears and the work as a gesture and action implodes.

The formalities attained depends on the geopolitical situation in which the artist operates.

His scope is not of an aggressive nature and not even a reaction to a situation, but a representation amplified to such levels of near paradox.

In this occasion he will present at the gallery an intervention yet to be revealed. This event will occur within the gallery space at Lucca.