Exhibition | Anatomical Sculptures and Penis Fonts by Nicolás Guagnini at Bortolami, New York

Last year Bortolami gallery held an exhibition of works by Nicólas Guagnini (Nov. 20, 2014 – Jan. 10, 2015). The show featured several sculptural works as well as an odd addition we don’t see that often: a typeface.

David and Ludwig take the form of busts, but the were among the largest works on show. The gallery states that the two “monumental” heads pictured above are made from majolica-glazed stoneware reinforced with epoxy. Each head sits on four pieces of raw cedar.

Surrounding them were twelve vitrified ceramic sculptures, ranging between eight to 20 inches in height, according to the gallery. These continued the show’s anatomical theme by including penises, noses, feet and hands. One outlier sculpture rested directly on the floor while the others sat on books taken from Guagnini’s personal library. Still other sculptures rested on cedar pedestals that were dyed with black sumi ink.

And though it wasn’t ceramic, one of the more fun works on display was, Dickface (2012), a typeface created by the artist and designer Bill Hayden. The duo supported this work with an essay, Some Notes on Dickface, which was printed in vinyl and hung on three walls of the gallery. We’ve included large images of that work here. Portions of the essay can be read by clicking on those images. And if you’re as enchanted by Dickface as we are you can buy the font here for one dollar. If you end up using Dickface for your own correspondence, please e-mail us a copy at info@cfileonline.org. It would be fun to have a reader-generated gallery of Dickface letters.

Nicolás Guagnini was born in 1966 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has lived and worked in New York since 1998, according to the gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include Heads, Lars Freidrich Gallery, Berlin; Nicolás Guagnini: Seven, Miguel Abreu Gallery and Balice Hertling & Lewis, New York; The Panel Discussion, The Tennis Match, and A Bodegon, Andrew Roth, New York; and The Middle Class Goes to Heaven, Orchard, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Bad Conscience, Metro Pictures, New York;140 Characters, Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo; Descartes’ Daughter, Swiss Institute, New York; A Drawing Show Curated by Dan Graham, Micheline Swajcer, Antwerp; and Notations: The Cage Effect Today, Hunter College Art Gallery, New York.

From 1997 through 2010, together with Karin Schneider, Guagnini produced films under the moniker Union Guacha Productions; their works have been screened in numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Jeau de Paume, Paris; and the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Guagnini was a founding member of the cooperative gallery Orchard, where, among other projects, he organized the exhibition September 11, 1973 (the title referring to the date of Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile.) A prolific writer, Guagnini’s texts have appeared in publications such as October, Texte Zur Kunst, Mousse, Kaleidoscope, and Artforum, as well as numerous books.

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