Vistamarestudio is pleased to present Did you know you have a broken glass in the window? the first solo exhibition by Anna Franceschini at the gallery.

Anna Franceschini continues her exploration of the narrative potential of displays and of the shop window as a para-cinematographic device.

The title is inspired by a story that actually happened at Tiffany’s New York in 1984, when an alarmed client mixed up the broken glass in a window display for an accidental damage, while in reality was a scenographic stratagem. The visionary display was created by Gene Moore, the brand’s artistic director from ‘50s to ‘90s, whose window designs are conserved at the Smithsonian Institution.

For this exhibition the artist has created a new film which employs the now-familiar repertoire of objects that has come to typify her practice, reinterpreting the shapes and materials of some of the window displays devised by the legendary American designer. Display units, souvenirs, props and lens filters, from Anna Franceschini’s personal archive, are used to create an immersive environment crowded with photographic and moving images, in a meditation on the very act of displaying and exhibiting.

In the gallery transformed by an environmental intervention, five new photographs in which the objects, part of a scenography, become sculptural images that, like post-materialistic still life, expose the aesthetic dynamics of the display. The timeless mise-en-scène becomes a world itself in which an emotional and psychological tension is generated between the passerby and the objects on display: the window display leads to an equivocal domain occupied by contemporary man’s hunger for possessions.

Reminiscent of Surrealist landscapes and Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, the extreme accuracy of Franceschini’s cinematographic and photographic language revels a pleasure for the simple artifice of optical illusions and for the craftsmanship of producing images. The artist reflects on the scenic representation in which the distinction between commodity and artwork increasingly blurred.

Anna Franceschini was born in 1979 in Pavia. Her work has been showed in solo and group exhibitions at numerous institutions worlwide, including Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunstverein, Dusseldorf; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Museion, Bolzano; CAC, Vilnius; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Fiorucci Art Trust, London; Quadriennale, Rome. In 2019 she made the short film BUSTROFEDICO, a special commissioned project for the Italian Pavillion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She lives and works in Milan.