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Gagosian Quarterly

Summer 2019 Issue

Studio Peregalli

Art historian and curator Sergio Risaliti speaks with Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori Rimini, the duo behind the interior design firm Studio Peregalli, about their philosophical approach to design, the cinematic quality of their rooms, and the publication of their latest monograph, Grand Tour: The Worldly Projects of Studio Peregalli.

The dining room, lined with an early nineteenth-century papier peint and featuring a large crystal chandelier in the center, seen from the library

The dining room, lined with an early nineteenth-century papier peint and featuring a large crystal chandelier in the center, seen from the library

Studio Peregalli

Laura Sartori Rimini, architect, and Roberto Peregalli, philosopher, founded Studio Peregalli in Milan in the early 1990s and have created exceptional interiors and architecture for projects around the world, as well as designing theater sets and exhibitions. The international press has selected them as one of the 100 most influential interior design firms in the world. Photo: Hugh Findletar

Sergio Risaliti

Sergio Risaliti is an art historian, writer, and curator of exhibitions and interdisciplinary events. He founded the Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, and served as its director until 2002. Since 2014 he has acted as artistic director of projects at the Forte di Belvedere, the Stefano Bardini Museum, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Photo: Giovanni De Angelis

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Sergio RisalitiYour architectural and decorative interventions both pose and resolve a series of problems: the relationship between the present, for example, and the past, which you make real again without lapsing into academic reproduction or empty stylistic quotation. I feel as if I were experiencing a perceptual condition like being half asleep, somewhere between dream and waking and belonging to both those dimensions: your houses are inhabited by living people, here and now, but also by parts of the past, or rather of past lives and lost civilizations that today survive only as fragments and ruins.

Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori RiminiWe don’t think the present can exclude the past. It’s a past that is dreamed of, rediscovered through fragments and reinterpretations. Our work is a question not of reproducing but of reinventing—think of it as archaeological, as rediscovering traces of vanished worlds behind the skin of the walls. It’s not just about nostalgia. Looking back, as Rilke said, has a value in some way based on a future to which we don’t yet belong.

SRYour work puts back together the debris that Walter Benjamin writes about in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he describes a famous watercolor by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus.

RP & LSRThat’s exactly what we’re looking for—we’re trying to rediscover a harmony in the contradictions and dissonances of the present.

SRHow do you avoid conflict with each other—how do you maintain a dialogue, bring together heterogeneous elements that are also elements of your characters, of your singular sensibilities? The results are a perfect harmony of perhaps quite different ideas, tastes, and preferences, just as your predispositions and personal talents are different.

RP & LSRWe do have different departure points, different approaches to life and to work, but it’s these differences that have allowed us a fertile dialogue over all these years of working together (twenty-six now!). There are conflicts sometimes but it’s always positive in the end, because we have shared goals: a love of beauty, a sense of the power of details, an attention to the nuances of time.

SRHow do you develop a project? How do you relate to the client? Do you need carte blanche? Do you construct the work step by step with the client, or do you prefer to surprise them, to catch them off-guard?

RP & LSRAfter the site itself, the client is the most important element in a project. Carte blanche does not exist, because you always have to establish a dialogue with the people you’re working for, and it’s important that they be happy with the result as well as that we are. We make a journey with the client. There can be moments of being caught off-guard, moments of surprise, but these later get put back together so as to end up with a shared outcome at the journey’s end.

SRAccording to Walter Pater and then Edmond de Goncourt, a house is an expansion of the body of the person who lives in it, in the same way that the body in turn is a projection, an expansion, of the soul. Robert de Montesquiou used to compare the house one lives in to a state of mind. Do you agree with the ideas of these great literary figures?

RP & LSRIn the end, a house, if successful, certainly reflects the soul of its inhabitant. Heidegger said that to dwell is to take care of the world. For us, discovering and accommodating the soul of both house and client is obligatory. Our houses aim not to be “period rooms” but containers where a place’s previous life and the people who now live there merge.

Studio Peregalli

View of the living room with the impluvium, illuminated by a skylight, and the columns painted in faux cipolin

SRYour new Rizzoli book, Grand Tour, covers various locations: you start in Milan, move on to Tangier and Tel Aviv, then pass the Strait of Gibraltar to New York. It’s a journey in space and time, encountering not only different civilizations, languages, and customs but different materials, techniques, and tools.

RP & LSRThat’s what we’re trying to do in the book—to show the beauty of the ties and resonances that every place and every civilization has, and at the same time to respect them and let them be experienced. In a world where everything is assimilated and aesthetic differences are often smoothed over, we try to revive those differences and understand what they can give us.

SRYou are in harmony with the great civilizations of the distant past, the recent past, and the present, and you keep alive earlier generations, belying the sacred scripture that tells us “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

RP & LSRDialogue with the past makes it possible to create a bridge toward the future.

Our work isn’t so much an eclecticism like that of the late nineteenth century, but more a leap into a time past, revisited, as you say, as if in a dream.

Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori Rimini

SRIn New York you designed a new home for two extraordinary artists, John Currin and Rachel Feinstein—two artists distinguished by their refined interpretations of the history of art and taste, which they treat with irony and countless subtleties.

RP & LSRThat was a stimulating project. Their house dated from the early 1900s; it had been reworked a good deal, but still preserved an aura. John and Rachel have very strong personalities, and at the same time, being artists, they know how to listen. To go on a journey with them allowed us to reconsider the importance of art in our lives. We wanted their work to stand in dialogue with ours: the idea that art has to have a context that resembles it seems reductive to us. A strong work can exist perfectly well in an environment that has its own autonomy.

SRIn the book, Currin says that irony assuages both nostalgia for the past and disgust for the present. Do you see yourself in this statement, which seems to suggest someone who detests mediocrity and admires the sublime, which he perceives in feelings and ideas that were part of great art in the past?

RP & LSRYes, in a way. But even as Currin makes this provocative statement, he repudiates it through his work. All his work as an artist is both a search for a dream tied to the past and a critique of the present. In this sense our own path, while different from his, has strong similarities to it.

SRAnother significant passage that helps us to understand your work is the one in which Currin and Feinstein sing the praises of Italian craftsmanship: only in Italy, they say, can they satisfy their desire for perfection. What they find there is not superficial reproduction but ancient knowledge, inherited quality.

RP & LSRWe appreciate this compliment, because it’s true that our projects would remain unrealized dreams if it weren’t for the team of craftspeople we work with.

Studio Peregalli

The living room, its door open on the enfilade of rooms, lined in a faux damask hand-painted canvas and with ceiling moldings and bas-relief doors in ivory and gold

SRLeafing through the book, with an excellent layout by Luca Stoppini, it’s as if we were looking at a film, a cinematic series of images passing before our eyes. The book is more than a document of a body of work that explores the feelings and emotions woven into places, spaces, ways of being and loving; it’s like a film with framed highlights, bringing to mind Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist [1970], Luchino Visconti’s Senso [1954], and Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis [1970]. Your methodology recalls the various disciplines of architecture, philosophy, interior design, restoration, lighting—the lighting design in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon [1975], for example. In your spaces, in other words, dream is reality and reality is the projection of a dream.

RP & LSRThe comparison with cinema is right, because our houses are like series of images, room following room in a perspectival enfilade that should be read in its totality. Every detail, from the furnishings to the texture of the walls in sunlight, contributes to this harmony. Like a film director, we have to manage different groups of people who must coexist over a timespan sometimes even longer than that of a film.

SRYour works layer not only times and civilizations but feelings and perceptions. Every detail, every color and form, germinates new faculties by which the individual, in a vague yet sure way (as when half-asleep), perceives things that exceed the actual capabilities that are intended and felt. This seems to me to imply an incredible expansion of time, an expansion of the emotional and cognitive life of the inhabitant, experiencing thousands of suggestions and perceptions, subtleties and fantasies, memories and reminiscences. Your interiors allow a possibility of being removed from the superficial, dehumanizing haste of contemporary life.

RP & LSRTime, patience, patina, care, detail, feeling—these are important words for us, as are the stratifications that a place ends up having. Its soul is precisely what is revived in the people who inhabit it. Our work isn’t so much an eclecticism like that of the late nineteenth century, but more a leap into a time past, revisited, as you say, as if in a dream. For us our work has a quality of rupture, constituting a new way of reflecting on the present and at the same time interpreting signs of the future.

Photos: Roberto Peregalli

Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori Rimini, Grand Tour: The Worldly Projects of Studio Peregalli (New York: Rizzoli, 2018)

Self portrait of Francesca Woodman, she stands against a wall holding pieces of ripped wallpaper in front of her face and legs

Francesca Woodman

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

self portrait by Jamian Juliano-Villani

Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson

Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

portrait of Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day

Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.

Black and white portrait of Katherine Dunham leaping in the air

Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955

Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Black and white portrait of Frida Escobedo

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.

Black and white portrait of Maria Grazia Chiuri looking directly at the camera

Fashion and Art: Maria Grazia Chiuri

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been the creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections at Dior since 2016. Beyond overseeing the fashion collections of the French house, she has produced a series of global collaborations with artists such as Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Penny Slinger, and more. Here she speaks with the Quarterly’s Derek Blasberg about her childhood in Rome, the energy she derives from her interactions and conversations with artists, the viral “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, and her belief in the role of creativity in a fulfilled and healthy life.

Portrait of artist Kelsey Lu

Kelsey Lu

Art historian and curator Olivier Berggruen reflects on his trip to Berlin to see a performance by the multihyphenate Kelsey Lu. Following his experience of that performance, The Lucid, Berggruen caught up with Lu in New York, where they spoke about the visual elements of their work, dreaming, and the necessity of new challenges.

Portrait of twins Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe in front of a beach, one of them sits in a lawn chair and the other stands behind looking out of a spyglass

The Art of Biography: Mary Gabriel and Carol Kino

Carol Kino’s forthcoming biography of Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe, the identical twin sisters who blazed new trails in the world of photography—Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines—charts a critical moment in the United States, bringing to the surface questions around aesthetics, technologies, and gender through the arc of the twins’ lives. Here, Kino meets with award-winning biographer Mary Gabriel, whose 2023 publication Madonna: A Rebel Life described the unparalleled significance of the musician’s life and career, to discuss the origins of their most recent projects, as well as the specific considerations that underpin the process of narrating a life.

Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat sitting inside his studio and in front of his paintings

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.

Painting in gray tones of a man in a suit and tie holding an industrial-looking carousel from which identical suited men hang as if on a dilapidated carnival ride

Nostalgia and Apocalypse

In conjunction with My Anxious Self, the most comprehensive survey of paintings by the late Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) to have been staged outside of Japan and the first-ever exhibition of his work in New York, Gagosian hosted a panel discussion. Here, Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, delve into the societal context in which Ishida developed his work, in a conversation moderated by exhibition curator Cecilia Alemani.

Titus Kaphar and Derek Cianfrance both wearing large headphones and tee-shirts on a film set

Titus Kaphar and Derek Cianfrance

Titus Kaphar and director Derek Cianfrance spoke on the opening night of Titus Kaphar Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the spring of 2023. The pair discussed their respective practices, including Cianfrance’s film Blue Valentine (2010) and Kaphar’s film Exhibiting Forgiveness, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2024.

Black-and-white photograph of two women having breakfast in bed and reading newspapers with a tapestry of an abstracted face hanging on the wall behind them

A Flat on Rue Victor-Considerant

Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm’s friendship took them from New York to Paris and back, in front of and behind many cameras, and into the Surrealist avant-garde. Here, Gagosian director Richard Calvocoressi speaks with Ramm’s daughter, art historian Margit Rowell, about discovering her mother’s early life, her memories of Miller, and the collaborative work of photographers and models.