Andreas Fogarasi: 1978

For his solo show at Quartz Studio, entitled 1978, Fogarasi has created five new works from building materials found in the city of Turin – an apartment door, an industrial wire-glass window from the Officine Grandi Motori, tiles, wallpapers and an iron lattice create geometric compositions that are abstract, yet site-specific. Strapped together with iron bands and hung on the wall, they are concrete material portraits of the city.

One work is specifically dedicated to a building near Quartz Studio, the Cavallerizza Reale, a building complex designed around 1740 by the architect Benedetto Alfieri for the horses of the royal court. Today the Cavallerizza is an urban space in transformation, after years of abandonment it was reappropriated in 2014 and opened to the cultural life of the city. Several fires and changing owners make its future as a public space uncertain. With a burnt wooden beam at its core, Fogarasi’s work functions as a kind of totem for the complex’s current, precarious state.

Another iconic building sparked Fogarasi’s interest during his preliminary research on endangered Turin architecture, the “Centro Congressi Regione Piemonte” on Corso Stati Uniti, originally the “Istituto Federale di Credito Agrario per il Piemonte e la Liguria”, built on the design of the architect Amedeo Albertini completed in 1973. When Fogarasi came to the site in November 2022, the building was already in the process of being demolished, making place for a luxury apartment building. As he could not secure any parts or fragments from the building, photographs are the only remnant of its impressive modernist structure.