Artist in Focus: Andrea Galvani. What to see at Frieze New York

Frieze New York opens next week. Deutsche Bank Wealth Management lounge will present a selection of the artist’s work, including some that have entered the corporate collection. A highlight not to miss during the art fair. Whilst the artist works in a variety of media, photography seems to be a strong thread. Andrea Galvani (Italian, b. 1973) takes the documentary capacity of the medium and stretches photography’s technical nature to capture an instant in time towards becoming a compressed capsule of the liminalities in time and space; a catharsis that allows for silence and ultimately, a space for transcendence and the sublime.

The End is a trilogy of exhibitions unfolding in multiple manifestations, including photographs, a multichannel video installation, a simultaneous sound project, drawings, objects, and a performance. Llevando una pepita de oro a la velocidad del sonido (A gold nugget accelerating at the speed of sound) is the premier stage. With scientific rigour and collaborating with producers, pilots, engineers and cameramen, Galvani orchestrated different actions produced simultaneously.

Training over the course of months, he flew parallel to military jets, shooting a specific event from an F-18 aircraft. A series of large-scale analogue photographs document the physical manifestation of the sound barrier breaking-point from a unique perspective. Sound travels in all directions across an omnipresent yet invisible field. To break the sound barrier is to reveal its physicality. As the jet travels faster than the speed of sound, it produces rapid pressure changes that generate an explosion: the sonic boom. Galvani captures the intensity of this moment through a sequence of placid photographs which swell in our awareness of their simultaneity.

Another work from the series, The End (Action #1) is a multichannel video installation documenting the sunrise simultaneously across 30 different locations in Central America. On January 8th, the anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s death in 1642, champion of modern cosmology, the sunrise was filmed. Discrepancies between atmospheric conditions, the sensitivity of 16mm film technology, and the movements of each individual manifest as a prism of time and space. The End (Action #1) presents the opportunity to witness the sunrise ad infinitum.

In contrast with the unending sunrise, The End (Action #5) shows a 16mm video of a never-ending sunset recorded from a military aircraft flying at supersonic speed against the direction of earth rotation. The horizon line could be a commonplace metaphor for the idea of boundary, personal perception, looking to the future and a romantic representation of nature. However, in his simultaneous collective action, collapsing geographic territories and personal experience, Galvani seeks to extend our experience of the horizon’s spatial and temporal limits, making visible nature’s forces and articulating their physical and conceptual flexibility.