“Grand Bal” explores the work of Ann Veronica Janssens as well as different aspects of her practice. Presenting the most comprehensive selection of her art work to date, it includes both historical projects and new productions designed to interact with the space of the Navate within Pirelli HangarBicocca and the outdoor area, expanding its boundaries. Since the late 1970s, Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, UK, 1956; lives and works in Brussels) has developed her research around light and its relationship to what surrounds it, often creating site-specific works that challenge the immutable nature of sculpture and installation.
Janssens has built her practice on overcoming the art object through its dematerialization and deconstruction. Through minimal forms and gestures that have an anti-monumental quality, Janssens is actually able to change the public’s perception of space. With their use of light, color, mirrors, air or artificial fog, the works of Janssens call for the direct participation of viewers, inviting them to experience reality differently, to develop an awareness of their senses, of the architecture and spatial-temporal categories by which we define it, emphasizing its sociopolitical and cultural aspects. Often based on experiments carried out in collaboration with scientists, the artist’s works become labs for testing the boundaries between properties and physical-material elements that are regarded as opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, emptiness and presence, the tangible and the incorporeal.
Text: Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca
Ann Veronica Janssens „GRAND BAL"
06.04. - 30.07.2023
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Via Chiese 2
20126 Milano
