Nanda Vigo, the inner space
Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design, Bordeaux
July 07, 2022 – January 08, 2023

Nanda Vigo, the inner space is an exhibition that introduces the work of the artist through immersive installations. Architecture, art and design are approached as total creative fields. The objective is to see, perceive and feel all the dimensions of Nanda Vigo’s artistic creation. More than a chronological presentation of her career, it is an experience that allows the audience to live the unframed dimension of her work. In order to communicate the contemporary, innovative and total value of Nanda Vigo’s work, several historic environments and installations, most of which have been demolished, will be reconstructed.

Immersed in a sensory experience that invites introspection, visitors will be able to understand the philosophical research that is omnipresent and fundamental to the artist’s work. Glass, aluminum, mirrors and neon lights, characteristic materials of her work, echo each other to appeal to our senses and give materiality to Nanda Vigo’s philosophical reflection. A series of her iconic objects will thus be presented, as the Cronotopo (that means space-time), conceptualized as an area of experimental research capable of expanding the lighting effects and perceptions of form through its glass and neon. Since 1959, Nanda Vigo has surpassed the frame and has gone out of the work to touch the spectator: the image becomes an environment where to live, act and react.

Nanda Vigo at the museum of Decorative arts and Design Presenting the work of Nanda Vigo at the madd-bordeaux, is an opportunity for visitors to immerse themselves in her avant-garde and unique work to grasp its contemporary dimension. Liberated from the limits of representation, Nanda Vigo has built her life and her work around the ideas of breaking the physical limits of space and transcendence. Her works, both experimental and immersive, are the testimony of her autonomy of action and thought as an artist convinced that art is a projection that carries within it the shape of the future society. Nanda Vigo, hard worker and constantly renewer of herself while remaining faithful to her conceptual research, has produced a considerable work.

Altough Nanda Vigo has always fought against the categorization of her identity as a woman, an artist, a designer and an architect, she declared that during her career she had towork harder than her colleagues and friends and prevail on them in order to obtain the success she deserved in the predominantly male avant-garde universe. Thanks to her strong personality and the broad research behind her innovative and aesthetic production, she has earned the respect of the greatest artists, such as Otto Piene, Gio Ponti and Lucio Fontana, with whom she has collaborated on several occasions.

However, despite her remarkable career, and like many other women artists or designers, her work has not yet acquired the recognition it deserves today. Organized in collaboration with the Archivio Nanda Vigo – founded in Milan by the artist’s will in 2013 -, this exhibition, which will be her first monograph in France, is both a tribute to her work and to her pioneering figure. A native from Milan and trained at the EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Nanda Vigo (1936-2020) stood out in the 1960s for her transversal approach to the arts, architecture and design.

A major figure in the Italian avant-garde art scene, she has always favoured the experimentation and the exploration. From 1959, she has attended the studio of Lucio Fontana, before getting closer to the artists Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, who founded the Azimuth gallery in Milan. It was during this period that she discovered the artists and places of the ZERO movement in Germany, the Netherlands and France. Between 1964 and 1966, she participated in numerous ZERO exhibitions in Europe; in 1965, she organized the legendary Zero Avantgarde exhibition in Lucio Fontana’s studio in Milan.

Between 1965 and 1968, she signed the interior of Lo Scarabeo sotto la foglia, a house developed from initial plans by Gio Ponti and built by Giobatta Meneguzzo in Malo in northern Italy. In 1971, she received the New York Award for Industrial Design, for the Golden Gate lamp produced by Arredoluce and carried out one of her most emblematic projects for the Casa Museo Remo Brindisi in Lido di Spina. In 1976, she won the Saint-Gobain first prize for glass design, and in 1982 she took part in the 40th Venice Biennale.

Nanda Vigo‘s creations are permanently presented at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, in the collection of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the Museo del Novecento in Milan and at the Castello di Rivoli. In 2014, she exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of the retrospective dedicated to ZERO. In 2015, within the Zero. Die Internationale Kunstbewegung der 50er und 60er Jahre exhibition program, she exhibited at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

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