Paola Pivi, installation view

Italian artist Paola Pivi, who won the top prize at the Venice Biennale contemporary art show in 1999, has opened her first major solo exhibition in her hometown of Milan, Italy. The exhibit, shown in this picture taken on Friday, Nov. 17, 2006, which is running through Dec. 10 at the Old Warehouse of Porta Genova Station, comprises three works: her Biennale-winning piece “Untitled,” an airplane flipped upside down meant to evoke an animal lying on its back, and two works conceived specially for the Milan show: a living sculpture of 46 white animals and 2,000 coupled objects, ranging from test-tubes to tractors. Pivi, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska, was born in 1971 and is considered one of the leading figures in Italian contemporary art. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

courtesy daylife

This is one of those instances where I don’t necessarily find myself in agreement with the artist’s own explanation of the work (for instance, I don’t think seeing an airplane upside down would make me think of an animal lying on its back). But Paola Pivi’s gestures are compelling enough on their own that they don’t need verbal justification, just as a poem does not need language around it in order to exist. It simply needs to act on the reader.

Something else I appreciate is that, using a literary analogy once again, the works do not clearly belong on the side of metaphor (objects representing something else) or metonymy (objects being what they are). They seem to agitate uncomfortably between those two realms.