On the occasion of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi exhibition Reaching for the Stars. From Maurizio Cattelan to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Manifattura Tabacchi hosts a special exhibition dedicated to Katja Novitskova in collaboration with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Manifattura Tabacchi Factory welcomes the works of the internationally renowned Estonian artist, which offer a reflection on the value of images in the contemporary world in an original dialogue between art, science and ecology.
Katja Novitskova’s exhibition is part of the Fuorimostra di Palazzo Strozzi and renews the collaboration between Manifattura Tabacchi and Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, inaugurated in 2020 on the occasion of the Tomás Saraceno exhibition. Aria, with an in-depth analysis of the philosophy of the Aerocene which develops projects of ecological sensitivity for a new ethical collaboration with the atmosphere and the environment.
In her photo-sculptures, which are part of the Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the artist reproduces images of animals such as a colorful ibis, a polar bear with a flushed face, a cat or three anthills all collected from the Internet and replicated in large format on shaped aluminum plates and cardboard panels. Novitskova’s intent is to demonstrate how our perception of space has been altered by rapid technological development and how the boundary between the natural world and its digital version is dissolving. Before the artist took possession of them, photographs transformed these animals into flat, immaterial images, but through her work Novitskova gave them back their three dimensions. However the audience’s photographs will bring them back to their inevitable starting condition. The result is a continuous exchange between real and virtual, within an ideally never-ending cycle.
