Picture Window Frame
Stefano Graziani
OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen
OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen
Fragments of Reality
by Cloe Piccoli
Picture Window Frame is a project by Stefano Graziani and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen. The artist and the architects have worked together over the years, sharing a critical mindset derived from Conceptual Art and, in particular, from the attitude of institutional critique to analyze the idea of the artwork and the exhibition space.
At Fondazione ICA Milano, an institution that belongs to the international historical network of Institutes for Contemporary Art, OFFICE challenges the gallery space and its functions, while Stefano Graziani deconstructs the idea of the document and the supposed objectivity of photography. The artist observes (and reveals) the ambiguity of the document, the enigma of how the highest degree of objectivity corresponds to total subjectivity. Graziani’s photography as a document is an open field of research1, a context in which absolute objectivity and personal biography paradoxically coincide.
The exhibition is the second iteration of a project that began with an invitation from Kathrin Oberrauch, curator of the Finstral collection - a leading windows and doors manufacturer in Europe - to carry out a project on the company’s production and collection2.
The Milan project is an opportunity to extend this commission to archival research. The archive is the place in which documents have a life of their own, capturing stories and memories. In this exhibition, Graziani juxtaposes photographs taken in the archives of Vincenzo Agnetti, Cini Boeri, Gabriele Devecchi, and Piero Manzoni with factory photographs and images of works from the Finstral collection, the Museum of Natural History in Milan, the Brera Academy, and the Ballet School of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala.
by Cloe Piccoli
Picture Window Frame is a project by Stefano Graziani and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen. The artist and the architects have worked together over the years, sharing a critical mindset derived from Conceptual Art and, in particular, from the attitude of institutional critique to analyze the idea of the artwork and the exhibition space.
At Fondazione ICA Milano, an institution that belongs to the international historical network of Institutes for Contemporary Art, OFFICE challenges the gallery space and its functions, while Stefano Graziani deconstructs the idea of the document and the supposed objectivity of photography. The artist observes (and reveals) the ambiguity of the document, the enigma of how the highest degree of objectivity corresponds to total subjectivity. Graziani’s photography as a document is an open field of research1, a context in which absolute objectivity and personal biography paradoxically coincide.
The exhibition is the second iteration of a project that began with an invitation from Kathrin Oberrauch, curator of the Finstral collection - a leading windows and doors manufacturer in Europe - to carry out a project on the company’s production and collection2.
The Milan project is an opportunity to extend this commission to archival research. The archive is the place in which documents have a life of their own, capturing stories and memories. In this exhibition, Graziani juxtaposes photographs taken in the archives of Vincenzo Agnetti, Cini Boeri, Gabriele Devecchi, and Piero Manzoni with factory photographs and images of works from the Finstral collection, the Museum of Natural History in Milan, the Brera Academy, and the Ballet School of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala.
Staging the Collection
by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen
To use window frames made by a window manufacturer seemed like an obvious decision when Stefano Graziani invited us to do the exhibition design for his work commissioned by Finstral. Not windows as finished products, but as building elements. Three frame modules and five types of joints made any arrangement possible. While the raw aluminum frames were meticulously designed—the largest with a glass infill for structural rigidity—the entire composition remained provisional. The form of the exhibit was the pure consequence of the method. The combined presence of technological rigor and arbitrary layout provided a resonating background for Graziani’s pictures: his systematic collection could only be complete with an element of randomness, something that doesn’t belong.
Two years later, the exhibition is in its second iteration, traveling from Finstral Studio Friedberg to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Milan. We decided to replicate the exhibition design and recycle the same raw aluminum frames. This time the difference is that the ICA gallery space is two and a half times smaller than the Finstral Studio. The frame structures therefore had to adapt to the new space. Compressed into a dense layout, the structure is now not just a hanging device, but an obstacle. It is an indication of its previous manifestation, a too-big-to-fit elephant in the room.
by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen
To use window frames made by a window manufacturer seemed like an obvious decision when Stefano Graziani invited us to do the exhibition design for his work commissioned by Finstral. Not windows as finished products, but as building elements. Three frame modules and five types of joints made any arrangement possible. While the raw aluminum frames were meticulously designed—the largest with a glass infill for structural rigidity—the entire composition remained provisional. The form of the exhibit was the pure consequence of the method. The combined presence of technological rigor and arbitrary layout provided a resonating background for Graziani’s pictures: his systematic collection could only be complete with an element of randomness, something that doesn’t belong.
Two years later, the exhibition is in its second iteration, traveling from Finstral Studio Friedberg to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Milan. We decided to replicate the exhibition design and recycle the same raw aluminum frames. This time the difference is that the ICA gallery space is two and a half times smaller than the Finstral Studio. The frame structures therefore had to adapt to the new space. Compressed into a dense layout, the structure is now not just a hanging device, but an obstacle. It is an indication of its previous manifestation, a too-big-to-fit elephant in the room.
Picture Window Frame, 2024 ICA Milano
Stefano Graziani, Photo by Guido Guidi
OFFICE 369, exhibition display at ICA, axonometric drawing
OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen
Can We Swim?
by Nitzan Cohen
In a world increasingly dominated by centralization, automation, and optimized efficiency, the fragmented, off-beat, raw, soft, or intricate—often the core of progressive creation—become obscured or unheard. Yet, within the layers between industry and art, fragments emerge as a powerful source for the new and next. Picture Window Frame offers a fragmented reflection of such a world, where boundaries between architecture, industry, photography, and art blur into a provocative, almost subversive, polylogue.
What does it mean to produce in a world where the boundaries between constancy and flux, culture and industry, are increasingly blurred? In Milan, an epicenter of cultural production, and in South Tyrol, the innovative production hub for this project and its windows, we find ourselves at the intersection of multiple modes, levels, and contexts of creation, production and innovation.
by Nitzan Cohen
In a world increasingly dominated by centralization, automation, and optimized efficiency, the fragmented, off-beat, raw, soft, or intricate—often the core of progressive creation—become obscured or unheard. Yet, within the layers between industry and art, fragments emerge as a powerful source for the new and next. Picture Window Frame offers a fragmented reflection of such a world, where boundaries between architecture, industry, photography, and art blur into a provocative, almost subversive, polylogue.
What does it mean to produce in a world where the boundaries between constancy and flux, culture and industry, are increasingly blurred? In Milan, an epicenter of cultural production, and in South Tyrol, the innovative production hub for this project and its windows, we find ourselves at the intersection of multiple modes, levels, and contexts of creation, production and innovation.
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Complete renovation of two buildings in the centre of Bergamo.