Pirelli HangarBicocca is not a small space. The enormous 1950s-60s shed once used to test high-powered machinery consists of a nave with two aisles, sitting within a district once comprising 200,000m² of factory buildings producing railway carriages and farm machinery, but which since the mid-1980s has transformed into a district of university, administration, culture buildings, and new residential. The HangarBicocca towers over it all, a dominating presence and a space which since 2004 has been one of the largest exhibition spaces in Europe, presenting a series of temporary installations from artists including Carsten Höller, Christian Boltanski, Maurizio Cattelan, and Lucy and Jorge Orta as well as, within one of its aisles, five of Anselm Kiefer’s immense stacked towers.

The area and hangar take their name from a 15th century country villa, the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, which still sits within the broader Pirelli site, but instead of luxuriating within a rural setting is now hemmed in by industry and a sports stadium. In English, the word Bicocca translates as a small castle in an elevated setting, and externally the villa has some architectural typology of a fortress, projecting strength. It was, however, constructed as a country residence for the Arcimboldi family, and so internally it was altogether more domestic and decorative, still with historic frescoes showing the leisure and occupation of court ladies from performing and dancing to music, playing chess, or preparing the wedding bed, with the exemplary textiles, hairstyles, and bodily poise of the day.



The main space of HangarBicocca, the Navate, is 30 metres in height across a 9,500m² area, a scale of exhibition space within which it would be easy to lose artworks in even it were not entirely blacked out into an depthless void. It is a challenging space to show art within, just as Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall can be, with artists having to contend with a scale which art rarely has to contend with. The latest artist to work with the hangar is Ann Veronica Janssens, an artist who since the early 1980s has explored sensorial perception to colour, light, sound, and space but whose work is profoundly delicate and intimate – qualities which may not seem to easily fit within the industrial magnitude of the venue.

In a curation by Roberta Tenconi, however, individual works are not lost in expanse but find their place in a constellation of moments the visitor finds their own path through. There is, however, a start and end point, both works the artist made in the 1990s. It all begins with a wall of 460 photocopied A2 images, a Becher-like grid of ephemeral constructions, but where Bernd and Hiller rigidly recorded strong industrial forms, Jansenns’ are altogether more precarious and delicate. Discovered across her travels, these architectures are the antithesis of the Becher’s western monoliths, documenting unfinished looking buildings: self-made structures formed of salvaged material, abandoned concrete shells, bivouacs made of foliage, ad hoc assemblages built atop existing houses.



For an artist deeply interested in the play between built and experiential space, architecture is at the heart of the project – whether that of the hangar or of a deconstructed understanding within individual works. For most exhibitions, the hangar is usually in pitch blackness, but here the artist has interrupted the void by opening up selected skylights to send shafts of light into the nave – not only forming geometric forces of quasi-religious strength, but also bringing life to the various works on show of colour and materiality which dance and sing in the light.

In a simply-conceived but physically-activated gesture a vast area of the Navate’s floor is raised with a vast double-layer grid of breeze blocks, an expanded Carl Andre which seems to monochromatically sink into the floor, but fill the space. Elsewhere, a single 12-metre long steel I-beam lays inert, but its top surfaced polished to a mirror, bouncing back the light shooting from above. Other discrete sculptural objects also capture and reimagine flitting daylight: mirrored circles sit on the floor like a series of wells suggesting a depth matching the 30-metre height of the space; immaculate glass circles sit as if they have just come to stop after rolling into the space, relaying light in all directions; aquarium-like cubes containing paraffin oil and water create impossible geometries of light, reflection, and refraction.



Hanging between them all is Golden Section (2009), a large and crumpled sheet of mirror foil, wafting with the air coming through opened doors and as visitors pass by. It was a work originally created with the artist Michel François during the creation of a choreography created and performed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Further along, two leaning rectangles similarly shimmer in light. From her ongoing Magic Mirrors series, shattered safety glass is sandwiched between dichroic glass and Gelatin filters. These foil and glass pieces read as though contemporary twists of the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi frescoes, and similarly bringing decoration, drama, and feminine movement to an otherwise masculine and heavy architecture.

In early April, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – an artist Janssens has collaborated with on many occasions – performed a new choreography in and relating to the installation. Pioverà, set to Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain (1965), explored how the body can fall in and out of sync with an environment. There is another bodily dance, of a kind, in the space. A large screen has projected upon it Janssens’ 2009 film Oscar, a close-up of Oscar Niemeyer slowly and silently smoking a cigar at the age of 102. It is an intimate presence, the smoke swirling in tune to his inner-thoughts. Elsewhere the artist has transfigured solid architectural components into a delicate fragility and subtlety, but here it is the pre-eminent architect of iconic and solid modernism who appears this way.




The exhibition ends with a call-back to the smoke exhaled by Niemeyer. A room at the end of the Navate is 13 x 22 metres, but the entering visitor would have no sense of geometry, scale, or space. As a counterpoint to the vast blackness of the main hall, MUHKA, Anvers (1992-2023) is a space full of artificial fog. Nervously shuffling into the silent whiteness, the only orientation offered for a visitor is a gentle chromatic gradient, a glass wall to the outside at the rear of the room allowing a barely perceivable shift to the colour of the fog as it is passed through.

As Marshall Berman via Karl Marx identified, “all that is solid melts into air,” and with this arrangement of works confidently arrayed across Pirelli HangarBicocca’s immensity, an assumed understanding of solidity, materiality, and modernist certainties is left as an open question. The graceful movement and folds of fabric in the frescoes of the nearby villa Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, from which the art venue takes its name, are more than decoration. They are all-encompassing artistic acts to break down the solidity of the fortress architecture, and through it the patriarchal, economic, and violent systems which led to its construction and form – systems as present in the 15th century as within the 20th century modernism tested by Ann Veronica Janssens.