Arcangelo Sassolino brings unpredictable forces to Mona as first solo Australian show opens
Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino’s work can break, shatter or burst at any moment. His latest installation at Mona.
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Somewhere deep beneath the surface of Mona, a stone sits perched on a sheet of glass. The glass strains beneath the weight. It may hold for five years. It may shatter in the next five minutes.
This is the Paradoxical Nature of Life, one of the works featured in Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino’s first Australian exhibition, in the End, the Beginning.
Even Sassolino, a sculptor who works with molten steel, explosive force, and precise engineering, cannot predict when or how this work will fail.
“It is the only work my engineers cannot calculate,” Sassolino told the Mercury.
“The only way we can do it is to test it, adding weight until the glass shatters.”
From June 6, visitors to Mona will enter Sassolino’s world, where time is not just a theme, but a physical component of the artwork itself.
“I like to think that something could happen while I’m watching, this instability is something that I’m very connected to,” he said.
“Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes some reactions start and everything seems like it’s collapsing, it’s always different.”
This concept reaches its apex in the exhibition’s title piece, in the End, the Beginning, a reimagining of Sassolino’s Venice Biennale installation Diplomazija astuta, designed site specific for Mona.
Molten steel is heated to 1500°C and rains from the ceiling, hitting the ground in an explosion of light, before disappearing into the darkness.
“In that moment there is instability, in this case it is energy transforming into light and then one moment after it disintegrates itself,” Sassolino said.
Though Sassolino produces his work in the industrial surroundings of Vicenza, Italy, a landscape he describes as “a bit destroyed” and “chaotic”, it was Tasmania that ultimately felt like the right place for his first Australian solo show.
“Four years ago, Tasmania was just a name on a map,” he said.
“But when Mona’s director saw my work at Venice, they reached out. I knew their vision. I thought it was a special place.”
Beginning his artistic journey as a toy maker, Sassolino said his work tries to capture the “universal message” that everything is continually transforming.
“For me I think an artist is a filter inside a society,” he said.
“What is happening out there politically, aesthetically, what is going on in the world attaches to the artist and then the artist develops that sensation in the form,” he said.
Sassolino’s in the End, the Beginning will run at Mona until April 2026.
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