Steps is the title of one of the most famous installations by Alfredo Pirri, contemporary Italian artist, born in 1957.
Alfredo Pirri
Pirri is internationally known for his installations and his artistic research that is extremely multifaceted, encompassing various disciplines such as painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Pirri, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Milan, and Rome, currently lives and works in Rome.
He began his artistic career in the 1980s and during that same period exhibited at the Venice Biennale. By the end of the 1990s, he participated in a group exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at the MoMA in New York, titled Minimalia: An Italian Vision in 20th Century Art.
Pirri has been a lecturer at various universities both in Italy and abroad.
Steps: work and meaning
The work, conceived in 2003 as part of the cycle that bears the same name, has over the years been hosted in various locations both nationally and internationally.
Steps consists of a spell of mirrors transformed into a gigantic walkable floor.
The artist invites the audience walking on his mirrors to reflect on the relationship between fragment and whole, between oneself and relationships with others. By stepping on the floor, the audience thus becomes part of the work, which translates into a performance.
The mirror is a symbol of multiplicity, of the double. Anyone who walks over it can easily see their own reflective image beneath their feet. One can thus be simultaneously both in singularity and in the collective.
Itinerant Steps
The confrontation and the reversal of the image that arises from the mirrors also applies to places for Pirri.
Steps indeed opens and reverses decidedly more traditional environments.
Over the years, it has been placed in religious buildings such as the Certosa di Padula and the Abbey of Novalesa, in cultural spaces like the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria di Pesaro and the Yugoslav Cinematheque in Belgrade, in museums such as Palazzo Altemps, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Forum of Caesar in Rome, the Museum Novecento in Florence, and also the former thermoelectric power plant of Daste and Spalenga in Bergamo and the former atomic bunker of Tito in Konjic, Bosnia.
Steps is currently on display at the Chiostro del Bramante, in Rome, as part of the exhibition Crazy, Madness in Contemporary Art, which is still open until January 8, 2023.
