Post-minimalism, born from the re-semanticization of what historical minimalism had consigned to history as irresolvable, is among the currents that have most deeply marked sculpture and installation over the last thirty years. If masters such as Donald Judd (Excelsior Springs, 1928 – New York, 1994), Robert Morris (Kansas City, 1931 – Kingston, 2018) and Dan Flavin (New York, 1933 – New York, 1996) had pursued an idea of absolute reduction through forms conceived as pure, neutral and incorruptible presences, the subsequent generation overturned that axiom while continuing to interrogate how much could be removed from the finished work, reintroducing into the white cube the residue and precariousness of perishable materials. Without betraying the minimalist rigor that instigated the subtraction of almost everything, on condition of maintaining the absolute presence of what remains, post-minimalists such as Paul McCarthy (Salt Lake City, 1945), Félix González-Torres (Guáimaro, Camagüey, 1957 – Miami, 1996) and Mike Kelley (Detroit, 1954 – Los Angeles, 2012) reintegrated into the horizon of the work the organic matter, the wear and the anthropomorphic suggestions from which it had been purged by the intransigence of the first-period exponents. The new challenge was to continue investigating the zero degree of the work’s physical presence while corrupting its imperturbability with the prosaic aspects of life, without weakening it. Form, with the irruption of the residual, the worn, and the serial object, cracks, dirties and becomes contaminated, acquiring the capacity to register what the imperative toward incorruptibility left out.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
The legacy of that season is the foundation of the artistic practice of Michael E. Smith (Detroit, 1977), who situates himself within this genealogy in a non-linear way, deflecting its outcomes toward a direction in which social and biographical urgency becomes plastic material as much as the found object. Raised in the dystopian Detroit of the collapse of the automotive industry, to which the unemployment of thousands of workers is attributed, Smith has developed a fierce poetics of the minimal in which that decline sediments into sculpture by incarnating itself in discarded objects still bearing the imprint of trauma. One of the reasons for the rapid success of his research (he was discovered by the powerful Berlin gallery KOW during a scouting visit to a group show of MFA students at Yale University School of Art, and shortly thereafter attracted the attention of important institutions such as the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and MoMA PS1 in Long Island City) is to be sought in the topicality of the questions the artist poses about what survives the cycles of production and consumption, the ways in which the body inscribes itself in objects and vice versa, and the meaning of inhabiting a world in which alert is an ordinary condition. Over his career, the artist has worked on the thread of the limit of erasure not to violate it but to hold it in tension, demonstrating that from the minimal something can still be subtracted without losing the work, and that this further subtraction produces something akin to emergency, where the minimum of means is a necessity and not an aesthetic choice.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
More than a decade after his Italian institutional debut at the Triennale di Milano in 2014, Michael E. Smith is now the protagonist in Bologna of a new solo exhibition installed in the underground spaces of Palazzo Bentivoglio, curated by Simone Menegoi and Tommaso Pasquali. “CC”, read in English as “see see”, a double imperative to look that anticipates duality as the cardinal formal principle of this project, presents a new body of works commissioned for the occasion that deepen the most recent orientation of his research. It is worth noting, that the presence of a title is already an element of novelty, since until now his exhibitions were rigorously untitled, as are the majority of his works. From the outset, the artist’s practice has distinguished itself by making organic residue a mother tongue: biological relics, taxidermies, carcasses of birds found in the suburbs of Detroit, bone fragments, animal fur placed alongside the inert skeletons of discarded computers, in a disturbing equation between the extinction of life and the degradation of objects. To that violence of material corresponded an equally declared operative vehemence: fabrics and garments cast in resin, then twisted, sawn and sectioned with a plastic action which, applied not to noble matter but to the detritus of a civilization in decline, referred in inverted form to traditional sculpture. His was an operation of panic love toward objects understood as fetishes of human life, but also the cry of discomfort of one who found in organic remains and material lesion the only possible language. In “CC” that cruelty (one is not quite sure whether exercised upon or suffered by things) seems to have thinned, and Smith demonstrates that he no longer feels the need for that kind of material: the objects he works with are still serial and borrowed from American mass culture, but whole, new, sometimes still packaged as goods awaiting consumption rather than relics of exploitation.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
To create the exhibition, Smith retreated in isolation into the exhibition space, located in the sixteenth-century underground of Palazzo Bentivoglio, which unlike a white cube is strongly characterized by structural irregularities, barrel vaults, exposed brick, cobblestone floors and traces of plasterwork. Like a jazz musician familiarizing himself with an acoustic space, the artist sounded out the environment to understand how to modulate his presence in relation to what he perceives as an organic entity to be intervened upon with a parsimony refined over years of heightened sensitivity, respecting its folds, trajectories, echoes and hollows of silence. Light (or its absence, since in some areas one proceeds by touch) thus becomes the first plastic material with which to shape the habitat of his works so as to constitute their indispensable connective tissue, imagining them as vital components of a single sentient structure. The compositional grammar underlying their existence is made explicit in the title. “CC”, beyond the exhortation to look carefully (and indeed some works must be sought out in the most marginalized structural recesses), is the pair, the specular repetition, the binary intermittence: two wicker baskets, two guitars, two toy cars, two luminous spheres, two cartoon eyeballs, two selenite crystals. Everything in the exhibition tends toward two like an echo that never entirely dissolves, like a mirror that always returns a slightly altered version of what it reflects, like the parallel reality of the subconscious in which the reverberations of what we try to suppress are imprinted.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
At the entrance to the first room (the most luminous in the exhibition, despite Smith having removed all the spotlights and reduced to a minimum the power of the single LED strip remaining) the sculpture-diaphragm “my sweet lord/today is a killer” is the unmistakable signal that the threshold of the uncanny has been crossed. The work consists of a portal conceived as a double screen of transparent red cellophane, inside which two rough tresses of synthetic blonde hair have been trapped, impaled like trophies on cardboard tubes emphasizing the human scale. The work is at once painting, by virtue of the red transparency that filters the space like a cathedral window, here industrial and flammable, and an imposing physical presence, the expression of an authority that Smith usually distributes in a more decentralized manner. Peripheral within the large space punctuated by brick columns are the other works: “untitled”, a solemn pair of fabric-covered tables that one instinctively assimilates to catafalques by their proportions and placement in the imaginary nave of the deboned secular temple into which the room transforms. In an apsidal position, “untitled”, a worn basketball (one of the artist’s most recurrent fetishes) on which Smith has modeled with expanding foam eye sockets and a grin, turns toward two wicker baskets placed a short distance in front, in a silent rebound between the severed head and the basket into which it will be thrown for sport.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
In the following room the orchestration of light is no longer uniform and the greatest concentration of works is found precisely in a marginal dark hollow, where a brass double bed is inhabited by two bean bag chairs, evocative of two bodies curled in a fetal position, illuminated by a skateboard that projects a science fiction film light onto the headboard. An intermittent click refracts as if to probe the subtle domestic unease evoked by all the works present in this second room, including, in the neon-lit area, a tablecloth used for years by his family. Inside and near the channel separating wall from floor, two electric guitars nestle (one bearing the effigy of SpongeBob, a 1990s cartoon icon he has cited on other occasions) along with a small figure made of tennis balls (another of his obsessions) tied together starting from an oversized gadget serving as a head. Here too the double: the normal version and the one inflated to absurdity, the ball as sphere and as head, as plaything and as skull. Nearby, an Adidas shoebox as the fragile exoskeleton of a mint-green foam grasshopper, an “animal” constructed from packaging offcuts, immobilized in an attempt to hide despite its garish colors. Some rooms, by contrast, are completely immersed in darkness, a fundamental tool in the artist’s grammatical system for constructing the void within an exhibition space and for sharpening the sensory receptivity of those who pass through it. And this darkness is found declined in two opposite modes in the various satellite environments into which the exhibition articulates. First, darkness as a reinvention of boundaries and as a tabula rasa on which luminous works can structure vision with their luminescent emanations.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
This occurs emblematically in the video “untitled” projected from the two portholes on the door leading to the Palazzo Bentivoglio storeroom (a distinctive trait of the artist is to attack exhibition locations in their technical recesses inaccessible to the public) consisting of two intermittent beams of red and blue light, the colors of the American police siren, a mute alarm at the scene of a crime already committed. Will the victim be the child from whom the shiny flesh-colored anorak has been torn, appearing shortly beforehand laid out on a table in the posture of an anatomical dissection or a piece of evidence? On the other hand, darkness can be an infinite matrix of nightmares and disorientation, as occurs at the beginning of the exhibition route in a small secluded service room. Here the lit LEDs of a pre-existing reception telephone set the tone for the chaotic proliferation of fluorescent (or entirely invisible) object-presences that crowd the environment almost as if seeking to reveal some of its possible secret cavities, in the tangible premonition that countless others could open up in every fold of the space. The skeleton here is not in the closet but, with a vein of dark humor, in the drawer: opening one of the pulls of the cabinet placed under the desk and shining a torch from one’s smartphone, a human skull — an ironic citation of his crudest works? — appears neatly stored next to a battered tape recorder.
Michael E. Smith, “CC”, a cura di Simone Menegoi e Tommaso Pasquali, Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, 2025, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy Galleria Zero
For those who know the artist, in conclusion, “CC” is an exhibition in which something has shifted. The method remains unchanged (improvisation as structure, the space in which the works live as macro-environmental work, light as an active agent of transfiguration) and the underlying idea remains that making art at this historical moment means bearing witness to something happening beneath the skin of real life, orchestrating the minimum of necessary elements and the maximum of tension they are able to sustain. But, one might say, the achieved emancipation from an autobiographical discomfort reduces the accent on the consumption of the elements used, in order to translate that restlessness into a more universal dimension and open the research to a more marked interest in the exploration of space understood as an organic system.
Info:
Michael E. Smith. CC
Curated by Simone Menegoi and Tommaso Pasquali
30/01/2026 – 26/04/2026
Palazzo Bentivoglio
via del Borgo di San Pietro 1, Bologna
www.palazzobentivoglio.org
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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