Marais, Paris
Franco Mazzucchelli
Is It Yours? Is It Mine?
HussenotGalerie Hussenot is pleased to present Is It Yours? Is It Mine?, the first solo exhibition in Paris by Franco Mazzucchelli (b. 1939, Milan). The exhibition brings together two central bodies of work from Mazzucchelli’s practice: Interventi, inflatable sculptures derived from the historic A. to A. (Art to Abandon) series, and wall-based works from the series Bieca Decorazione (Awry Decoration). Since the mid-1960s, Mazzucchelli has pursued an artistic language rooted in industrial materials and pneumatic form. The A. to A. works—large PVC sculptures abandoned in squares, factories, and beaches—were conceived to exist outside traditional exhibition contexts. Released into public life, they were handled, altered, or destroyed by chance encounters. Their existence was precarious and finite, yet they offered brief moments of collective play and estrangement, pointing to both the promise and the fragility of art’s social role. Decades later, with Bieca Decorazione, Mazzucchelli returned to the inflatable medium in a different register. These wall-based works reduce the exuberant forms of the A. to A. sculptures to rigorous geometric modules. Their decorative function is openly acknowledged, even declared in their title. Where the abandoned inflatables dissolved into the social fabric, the Bieca Decorazione works insist on their status as objects of display and exchange, their air valves stamped with the artist’s name in place of a signature. Placed in dialogue, these two series chart the tension between art’s utopian aspirations and its institutional and economic realities. The gesture of abandonment and the embrace of decoration, seemingly opposed, are revealed as two sides of the same condition: art’s continual negotiation between critical distance and complicity, between collective imagination and the inevitability of commodification. This exhibition marks the first presentation of Mazzucchelli’s work in Paris and offers an opportunity to discover a practice that has, for more than five decades, interrogated the limits and functions of art within contemporary society. Franco Mazzucchelli (b. 1939, Milano) lives and works in Milan. He was professor of Techniques of Sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. His work has been shown in exhibitions such as the 15th Milan Triennale (1973), the 37th Venice Biennale (1976), and the 11th Rome Quadriennale (1986). Recent presentations include MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome; Centre Pompidou-Metz; Cité de l’Architecture, Paris; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Kunsthalle Wien; ZKM, Karlsruhe; and Museo del Novecento, Milan. His works are held in public collections, including the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2022, he received the Alfredo d’Andrade Lifetime Achievement Award.