One Year at the National Gallery

The series of photographs taken by Marina Malabotti in 1981 inside the National Gallery, comes after a long time spent in the rooms of the museum, studying, rather than the architectural and material characteristics, their fluid nature, constantly shifting, as a social and relational device.

Observing the 35mm contact sheets highlights how within marginal areas of the museum, such as the archives and storerooms, Malabotti immediately heads towards a psychological and phenomenological approach to the artistic space, which is observed and interpreted mainly through the faces and connected actions of its key players.

The museum institution is first and foremost a place where knowledge is created and shared. Here – as can be read in a manuscript note of the time – “The Gallery exhibits itself, outside its setting, without debate, without qualifications, without intervention. When a factory is shown, it is identified by its architectural structures, by the components (machines and men), by the results (production). The gallery produces culture. We show the culture, we verify the usefulness, we use the knowledge”.

By leaving the National Gallery of De Marchis, the One year in the Gallery project will not be completed and shall remain unpublished. In presenting this series, its incompleteness must therefore necessarily be taken into account. For example, the work notes show how, the intention was that observing the space would have highlighted a strong dimensional imbalance between the enormity of the rooms and the smallness of the human figures. Equally important would have been the figures of technicians, workers, museum staff, ideally opening and closing the exhibition and posing in a group together with the photographer in the last, never taken, image.