MATERIALS: Branding on wooden exercise machine, weights
DIMENSIONS: 223 × 80 × 62 cm
INSCRIPTIONS: Signed, dated and titled on the verso, lower edge ‘Fabio Mauri / 1995 / ‘Pesariani’ ARIERWIEGE’
PROVENANCE: The artist
COLLECTION: Fabio Mauri Estate, Rome
CATALOGUE: O_1995_601
A wooden gymnasium machine from the turn of the last century. ‘Arierwiege’ was the title of Mauri’s exhibition at the Galleria Sauro Bocchi, Rome in 1995, where the artist presented his corpus of ‘Aryan objects’. Although not in current use, the German compound word Arierwiege is a juxtaposition of the adjective Arier, ‘Aryan’, and the noun Wiege, meaning ‘cradle’, whose verbal form, zu wiegen, may indicate both the act of cradling and the act of weighing. The work would also later be published as Arierwaage, alluding more explicitly to Waage, a scale. In this case, the weight being weighed is not so much that of the physical body – rather than a weighing scale, the machine in question is a piece of gym equipment for exercising muscles – but the ideological weight of a bourgeois society represented through its status symbols (see also inv. 593, 1023).
1995, Rome, Galleria Sauro Bocchi, Arierwiege, 31 May – 30 June.
1995, San Marino, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Crossbowmen's Quarry, Titanica. Simbologie del contemporaneo, 24 June – 10 September, curated by Vittoria Coen.
1996, Paris, Galerie Alessandro Vivas, Regole Native: Anselmo, Fortuna, Icaro, Mauri, Pisani, 17 April – 18 May.
1996, Milan, Galleria Maria Cilena, Regole Native: Anselmo, Fortuna, Icaro, Mauri, Pisani, opening 30 May (travelling: 1996, Paris).
1998, Castelluccio di Pienza (Siena), Galleria La Tartaruga, Picnic o Il buon soldato, 5 September – 11 October, curated by Benedetta Origo, Plinio De Martiis.
1999, Barcelona, Fundació “La Caixa”, La meva cosina Marcella i la guerra civil, 29 January – 21 March, curated by Martí Peran.
1999-2000, Lecce, Castle of Charles V, Spazi in luce: da Caravaggio oltre Fontana, 23 December 1999 – 27 February 2000, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva.
2001, Rome, A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna, Fabio Mauri: Un’utile macchina. Massimo Bucchi: Le finestre sul cortile, 12 April – 5 May, curated by Francesco Moschini, Anna Rita Sordini.
2013, Venice, Galleria Michela Rizzo, Fabio Mauri. Picnic o il buon soldato, 23 September – 14 December.
2016-2017, Bergamo, GAMeC, Fabio Mauri: Arte per legittima difesa, 7 October 2016 – 15 January 2017, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio.
Titanica. Simbologie del contemporaneo, exhibition catalogue, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Crossbowmen’s Quarry, San Marino, edited by Vittoria Coen (San Marino, 1995), p. 40 (ill.).
Daniela De Dominicis, “Fabio Mauri. Sauro Bocchi, Roma”, in Flash Art, Year XXVIII, no. 194, Giancarlo Politi Editore, Milan, October–November 1995, p. 118 (ill.).
Mario Codognato, “Fabio Mauri. Studio Bocchi”, in Artforum International, New York, December 1995, p. 97 (ill.).
Regole native: Anselmo, Fortuna, Icaro, Mauri, Pisani, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Alessandro Vivas, Paris (Milan / Paris: Galleria Maria Cilena, Studio Ippolito Simonis, Galerie Alessandro Vivas, 1996), p. 19 (ill.).
Annuario d’arte moderna ’96: artisti contemporanei (Rome: A.C.C.A. - Associazione Culturale Capitolina Artistica, 1996), p. 414 (ill.).
Trasalimenti 98: Progetto per l’arte contemporanea, exhibition catalogue, Medieval village, Castelbasso (Teramo) (Grottammare, Ascoli Piceno: Stamperia dell’arancio, 1998), p. 71 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. Picnic o il buon soldato, exhibition catalogue, Galleria La Tartaruga, Castelluccio di Pienza (Siena), edited by Plinio De Martiis (San Quirico d’Orcia, Siena: Editrice DonChisciotte, 1998), p. 9 (ill.).
Spazi In Luce: da Caravaggio oltre Fontana, exhibition catalogue, Castle of Charles V, Lecce, edited by Achille Bonito Oliva (Milan: Centro Arte Maiocchi, 1999), p. 29 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. L’universo d’uso, exhibition catalogue, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome, edited by Francesca Alfano Miglietti (Milan: Skira, 2008), p. 74 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri, Io sono un ariano (Milan: Lampi di stampa, 2009), pp. 332–334 (ill.).
Elena Volpato, “Fabio Mauri: starting from the end”, in Mousse, no. 29, Milan, Summer 2011, p. 144 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. Arte per legittima difesa, exhibition catalogue, GAMeC, Bergamo, edited by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Bergamo: GAMeC Books, 2016), p. 88 (ill.).
