Lorenzo Vitturi - Materia Impura
18 October 2019 - 19 January 2020
The exhibition will open on 17 October 2019 in the presence of the artist. You are welcome from 17.30 hrs onwards.

The body of work of Lorenzo Vitturi (1980, Italy) investigates urban changes beyond Western cities, processes of cultural mixing and their complexities, and the movement of people and goods in a globalised world. Playing with the combination of reality and fiction, mixing photography, sculpture, painting and performance, he builds temporary sets in his studio, drawing from specific geographical environments. His projects focus on cities including Lagos, London and Venice and selected areas in Peru; on their colours and shapes and the communities that inhabit them. Vitturi uses selected materials in his sculptures and photographs to investigate the passage of time in a globalised world, capturing its mutations.

The exhibition Materia Impura summarises ten years of research, combining Vitturi’s earlier projects Dalston Anatomy, Droste Effect, Debris and Other Problems and Money Must Be Made. It also presents the first output of Vitturi’s new work Caminantes (Spanish for walkers). This project draws inspiration from his family history and explores the encounters between and merging of different cultures. In the 1960s, his father, originally from Venice, crossed the Atlantic to open a Murano glass factory in Peru. There he met Lorenzo’s mother. Drawing from a series of trips between Peru and Italy, Vitturi combines selected materials, which carry stories of local cultures and encounters, as well as performs ritualistic gestures related to traveling and shipping. The fusion of materials allows the viewer to question their function as cultural markers and to explore the dynamics of converging cultures, showing that no element can be seen as pure. While travelling, Vitturi combines glass with a wide range of raw materials (rocks, wood, foam, textiles, shipping materials) collected along the way and he creates series of ephemeral interventions in the environment. At the end of the trip, he fuses the glass with Peruvian soil. Returning to Venice, together with the materials processed in Peru - as a final act of transformation - he combines them in the lagoon and makes a series of physical sculptures where the materials from both places find their final stage of transformation.

In Vitturi’s photographs, we see a cacophony of texture and colour. The camera documents the makeshift sculptures and interventions in the landscape, and as such, they endure. The landscape interventions mirror the impermanent nature of a rapidly changing globalised world in which cultures fuse. Meanwhile, their reintroduction in the exhibition space as photographic images and physical sculptures allows us to reflect on constant cycles of production, destruction, and recreation.

Lorenzo Vitturi (1980, Venice) lives in London, UK. Vitturi’s first institutional solo show took place at Foam 3h in 2013.Solo exhibitions include Dalston Anatomy at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, at Contact Gallery, Toronto, and CNA, Luxembourg. Vitturi also participated to group exhibitions at MAXXI in Rome, at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, at Palazzo Reale in Milan, at La Triennale in Milan, at BOZAR in Brussels, at K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, at Barbican Centre and Somerset House in London. Publications include Dalston Anatomy (2013) and Money Must Be Made (2017). Vitturi won several awards including the Photography Grand Prix at the Hyeres International Festival in 2014. More recently he was chosen as one of the winners of the Grand Prix Images Vevey in Switzerland (2018).

Lorenzo Vitturi - Materia Impura is on show from 18 October 2019 until 19 January 2020. Foam is open daily from 10.00 until 18.00, Thu/Fri from 10.00 until 21.00 hrs.

Foam is supported by the BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, City of Amsterdam, Foam Members, Olympus and the VandenEnde Foundation.