Subdivided into four sections, between the exhibition spaces of Gamec and the historical hall named Sala delle Capriate, at Palazzo della Ragione, the exhibition entitled Practitioner’s Delight, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, introduces, for the first time to the Italian public, a dense, an extensive corpus of artworks outlined by more than sixty works, belonging to the production of an American artist, a sculptor rarely-known in Europe. Among sculptures, drawings, paintings and installations created from the beginning of the Sixties up to the most recent series.

In Bergamo, every intervention by Gary Kuehn (Plainfield, New Jersey 1939. He lives between New York and Wellfleet, Massachusetts) is presented as the finished track of a controlled resistance. Of a measurement without numbers, of a possible loss, on the part of the material, of the ability to support or transmit the load of a component, within a geometric structure. Every material urged, forced and twisted by the American artist, is brought to the limit, near its capacity to provoke fractures or excessive deformations. But any amount of energy used, conveyed in compressions, bends and rotations seems, at the same time, to preserve and prevent probable involuntary breakages of the used materials, of the mutually linked components or of the aesthetic system, which, finally, represents a bearing capacity. When Kuehn, between Sculpture and Drawing, believes that every limit can be achieved, there is a sort of consolidation of shapes and volumes, provoking the revelation of indefinable physical tolerances, which are permanently transformed, significantly and quickly, the more we observe, we immerse ourselves into space.

Following the delicate, beloved restoration of some sculptures – realized thanks to the Gamec’s support – the exhibition itinerary prepares the visitor to read with awareness the three-dimensional presence of Wedge Pieces, Bolt Pieces, Melt Pieces, Mattress Pieces and Pedestal Pieces; historical traces that frame the work of Kuehn in opposition to Post-minimalism and the Process Art. Despite the shy and meditative nature of the American artist, his sculptural practice led him to be selected in milestones for a specific proscenium of contemporary art, such as: Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard in 1966 and When Attitudes Become Form, edited by Harald Szeemann in 1969. In these areas, the symbolic power of restraints and extensions has created the impossibility to define the formal path of Kuehn through univocal classifications.

In a well-conceived Mousse Publishing catalogue, in fact, a volume published on the occasion of the exhibition, the artist recalls "In the Sixties I used iron wire, clamps and bolts to hold the various materials together. I was looking for a way to get away from expressionism without having to submit to the rational and reductive authority of minimalism. In the Branch Pieces I used the bolts to join branches with geometric shapes: it was the first step towards a dialectical approach to my works and the beginning of my interest in constriction, the reunification of separate objects, within a single relationship. When I did those jobs I was trying to reconcile two aspects of my life. I came from a working family, but I was also an artist, a construction worker and a university professor, sometimes on the same campus."