Farewell to Alberto Garutti, artist of life and space (1948-2023)

From the brass pipes that connecting the sounds of piazza Gae Aulenti in Milan with those from the lower level, to street lamps (for a square in Bergamo as for a museum in Ghent) increasing in brightness with each new birth in nearby hospitals, to architectural-scale stone plaques rewriting the meaning of different places (This work is dedicated to the young women and young men who will fall in love in this little theater for the Peccioli theater, in 1994, Every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now for Siena or Milan Malpensa airport) to sculptural horses watching over the value of the landscape along with roofs covered in gold, Alberto Garutti’s works from the last decades have given intensity and materiality, even symbolic, to life, to its manifestation in space, more specifically: to relationships, in a word. Such space-based approach, which since the 90s has made Garutti one of the best-known interpreters of public art, was also linked to his training as an architect – he had graduated from the Milan Polytechnic, where he had then taught, as he had also taught at the IUAV and the Brera Academy where he held the chair of painting – and was also reflected in the physical character of his living place, where multiple layers from different phases of his biography – and not necessarily of his creative process – converged. Along with those of Vanessa Beecroft, Enzo Cucchi, Luigi Ontani and Michelangelo Pistoletto, Domus had visited Garutti’s home in 2014, publishing its story in April of that year, on issue 979.

Alberto Garutti’s way of living is a journey. His house and studio contain a collection of old suitcases bought here and there, each with a different story, like miniature houses. He’s more interested in the inside of the suitcase, not the idea of emptiness before it’s filled, but its lining, with geometrical, floral paper, a sort of wallpaper. His studio’s proximity to the railway, reminiscent of Sironi and Boccioni, also evokes travel. Garutti likes this closeness partly because “nobody builds next to the railway, and only wild vegetation grows there”. Circumstances have led him never to have his house and studio in the same place. But his house, too, is a studio, the most important perhaps, as “that’s where I get my ideas, mostly at night. But they also come when I travel by car, which is like being nowhere; whereas the studio is a place of action, where my works take shape, a bit like the house in the country, where you go out and chop wood”. 

For Garutti, house and studio are an interface with the world. “At home, years ago, I’d turn on the TV to relate to the world, whereas today that happens with the Internet, which has offered us a kind of ubiquity. So the home ends up living between these levels of articulated intimacy and movement.” His interiors are full of furniture, including chairs by Ponti and Eames, but also anonymous ones, some of them painted in phosphorescent colours that reveal their status as artworks when the light is switched off, from the series Cosa succede nelle stanze quando gli uomini se ne vanno? The furniture that belonged to his parents is his sentimental furniture, with its attached stories of life. The piano is the one Garutti gave to his father: “It’s a special piece of furniture that has greatly influenced my work. The cupboard, bedside tables and the bed where I was born were all designed in the ’50s by Antonio Cassi Ramelli, who worked for Piero Portaluppi. The cupboard still contains my father’s clothes, which I used to wear until not long ago. And there’s my mother’s Chanel perfume which I sniff from time to time, thinking of her.” 

Garutti goes on to show us his new designs for works that are in fact furnishings. There’s a cabinet made with a single sheet of perforated plywood standing in a corner, where you can hide to spy on people in a sort of infantile regression. There’s also a table with horizontal and vertical veneering. The two tops can be lifted and folded open to reveal coloured voids, like viewing a landscape at dawn or sunset. Another two small twin cabinets made of iron are also painted in phosphorescent colours, their peculiarity being that they have to be separated, preferably in different houses to create a relationship with the other – like the ceramic lamp with two bulbs, one that emits normal light and the other that turns on when somebody passes in the next room: hence a detector of presences. Conceived for Design Gallery Milano, “they reveal the secret side of living”. 

Then there’s the exterior, where Garutti purchased a piece of land with a ruin on it, where he keeps three donkeys that browse on the grass: “It’s on the mountain facing the lake, so I didn’t buy land, but a chunk of landscape.” The donkey is also the 1:1 scale sculptural subject for the front of a fireplace beneath the animal’s belly. Animal and vegetable intersect in life and work, like the pot with a Ficus benjamina in it, typical of a certain style of 1950s bourgeois furniture. That plant also featured in Garutti’s solo show at the PAC in Milan, as a nod to Ignazio Gardella, the architect who designed that gallery. The table top we’re sitting around is inlaid with architectural plans of the houses where he has lived. In reality, they are plans resulting from the removal of objects from rooms, “with the empty space between objects as the potentiality of becoming everything”.