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Michael Dean at Fondazione Converso

February 5, 2020

Artist: Michael Dean

Exhibition title: The End

Invited by: Julie Boukobza

Venue: Fondazione Converso, Milan, Italy

Date: January 23 – February 15, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Fondazione Converso, Milan

From January 23 to February 15, 2020, Converso presents «The End», a solo exhibition by London-based artist Michael Dean.

The exhibition takes its title from a new work written by M. Dean. «The End», a broken conversation of attempted red echo synchrony between two voices, written in response to the two-room former church, and its histrionic architecture divided and united by a semi-circle geometry of heaven for singing and listening. Books of diminishing pages (that the audience are invited to tear out and take away) deliver this new writing in space, as does the recording of writing read by both male and female talking in the protagonistic attitude of multifarious emotions, delivering a simple conversation both seriously and seriously funny at the same time, completing each other’s sentences at a distance.

«The End» presents a reading in space by way of the physical properties available to a holding on. A written and a spoken recorded. Read and heard.

The first time I met Michael Dean it was in Paris on April 21st 2016, the very day of Prince’s death. It was during the opening of an exhibition dedicated to one of Michael’s lifelong idols, the French writer and playwright Pierre Guyotat. I asked him which of Prince’s tracks was his favorite to date, and without surprise he answered: Alphabet Street.

“Alphabet Street” became the subject line of many emails that followed, and four years later the British artist known for his rough and tender concrete sculptures, always closely linked to his writing practice, is opening a solo exhibition at Fondazione Converso in Milan.

This 16th century-old former Mannerist church that lived many lives after it’s deconsecration in 1808, became a majestuous recording studio between the 70’s and the 80’s used by Maria Callas and Mina. The first time Michael Dean visited Converso, he screamed his iconic anthem “FUCKSAKE” until his voice broke. That was his own singular way to measure the limits of the space. There was never a difference in Michael Dean’s work between the inside and outside, what comes from inside the body needs to reach the same level of intensity in the outside. How to find solace from the powerful rhythm of a screaming bloody murder?

All of his sculptures were always transmitters and receivers in their own terms. They forever convey the hidden text / alphabet / voice that body language cannot repress. Sculptures as messengers from one Nile’s bank to the other, from one emotional state to the next. His works always being on the brink of collapse and joyful madness. «The End» is the title chosen by Michael Dean for this exhibition. The afterimage here is Benito Mussolini’s corpse with Claretta Petacci’s : «The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini’s face was disfigured by beatings » Wikipedia recalls. The image of Mussolini’s corpse haunted the artist during his study of Italian history, circling back to art with its famous Futurist incarnation «Profilo Continuo» by Renato Giuseppe Bertelli in 1933.

Finally, Michael Dean places on this holy floor some heart-shaped doormats, a pattern that he already used in the past, a manual on how to step on someone’s heart.

-Julie Boukobza

Michael Dean (b. 1977, UK) lives and works in London, UK. In 2001 he graduates from Goldsmiths, University of London with a BA in Fine Art. His artistic practice investigates the relationship between the three-dimensional possibilities of language and physicality, using different media: sculpture, text and typography.

His most recent solo exhibitions include: Tu texto aquí, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2019), Contemporary Sculpture: Sam Anderson &; Michael Dean, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida, US (2019), Having you on, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2018), Analogue LOL, ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai (2018), Four Fucksakes, Herald St | Museum St, London (2017), Teaxths and Angeruage, Portikus, Frankfurt (2017), Sightings: Michael Dean or Lost True Leaves, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016) and Qualities of Violence, De Appel, Amsterdam (2015).