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Relational Art: Living the Work
#Exhibitions
Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-1993 | © Gillian Wearing | Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Regen Projects, Lo

Mismatched chairs, shared tables, low lights: the work here isn’t contemplated, it’s inhabited. The path turns the museum into a laboratory of encounters where the public becomes the material, the subject, and the measure of art. This is the core of “relational art,” a practice that since the 1990s has placed human relationships and their social contexts at the center rather than the autonomous object - not a painting to look at, but a space, a situation, a time to be lived together. Theorized at the end of the decade as “relational aesthetics,” this tendency has rewritten the vocabulary of the contemporary: participatory installations, dinners, games, shared environments in which the artist becomes a catalyst and meaning is built between people. On view are works and devices by a generation that opened art to the collective sphere - Vanessa Beecroft and her choreographies of presence, Maurizio Cattelan between irony and symbolic short-circuit, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster with narrative environments; Carsten Höller and perceptual experience, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno between fiction and biology, Rirkrit Tiravanija with conviviality and frying pans as social sculpture. Thirty years on, the lesson holds - the artwork is a relational device that shifts attention from object to bond, from uniqueness to co-presence, from authorship to participation. In an age of networks and algorithms, this story reminds us that art’s primary material can still - above all - be the quality of our being together.
Viola Canova - © 2025 ARTE.it for Bvlgari Hotel Roma