Garage BENTIVOGLIO presents Untitled, Mona Lisa (without subtitles), 2010 by the artist collective Gelitin

Garage BENTIVOGLIO presents, in the window on Via del Borgo di San Pietro — which each month displays a work from the palace’s private collection — an intervention by the Austrian artist collective Gelitin. The presentation features a work that offers an ironic and irreverent reinterpretation of one of the most celebrated masterpieces in the history of art: the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

Made of plasticine and distinguished by a large protruding nose that disrupts its frontal view, the work invites viewers to shift sideways in order to observe it, transforming the act of looking into a physical gesture.

Gelitin, Untitled, Mona Lisa (without subtitles), 2010, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio, ph. Carlo Favero

This proposal looks to the intervention by Lina Bo Bardi in the upper gallery of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Brazilian museum she created together with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi in 1968, still considered one of the most revolutionary exhibition designs in twentieth-century museography. They decided to arrange the works so that they would saturate the space without a predefined hierarchy, allowing visitors to move freely among the large glass panels on which the paintings were suspended, constructing personal paths and unexpected juxtapositions between different periods, schools, and styles.

Freed from a rigid order, the collection thus offered itself to a more direct and intuitive gaze: all the works stood on the same level, having arrived in São Paulo almost simultaneously as a group. The intention was to make everything feel new to the visitor and to suggest that art produced on this side of the ocean might perhaps need to be stripped of its accumulated frameworks and seen with fresh eyes. A fifteenth-century painting could be placed next to a nineteenth-century one; the Italian school could encounter the Flemish tradition; and even masters such as Raphael and Pietro Perugino might appear surprisingly similar.

By mixing artists and styles in a light and almost unconscious manner, within a space open to new relationships and possibilities, the works—freed from a certain academicism—could once again begin to produce meaning.

Gelitin, Untitled, Mona Lisa (without subtitles), 2010, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio, ph. Carlo Favero

It is precisely within this freedom of vision that the work of the Austrian artist collective Gelitin takes shape. The large protruding nose that distorts the face of the Mona Lisa compels us to observe it more from the side than from the front, recalling the profile portraits of the Dukes of Urbino immortalized by Piero della Francesca, while the plasticine draws its vivid colours from the paintings of the early Renaissance of the Grand Duchy. What remains distinctly Leonardesque are several essential elements: the faithful adherence to the subject, the dimensions of the work, and above all an almost fetishistic obsession with the original.

As curator Davide Trabucco explains: “A copy of a work must come to terms with the idea we have of it; redrawing it is first and foremost a way of entering into dialogue with the original and reinterpreting its ultimate meanings. Re-making is an interpretative act; formal correspondences go hand in hand with choices that may appear arbitrary or incomplete, yet they prove to be the only way to transform those ancient signs into modern ones.”