Dimora Dislocata

MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to announce _Dimora Dislocata_, an exhibition by Alicja Kwade specifically conceived for the spaces of Casa Corbellini-Wassermann - her first project with the gallery in Milan. Drawing from twenty years of her practice, it brings together a unique selection of works that appear, at first glance, to be ordinary. In the former apartment of Casa Corbellini-Wassermann - a space that still carries the memory of the home it once was - they find their perfect setting. Six years after Eddington wrote those words, on Viale Lombardia, the architect Piero Portaluppi began building a house. The commission came from two families: the Corbellinis and the Wassermanns, heirs to a German pharmaceutical fortune. Among their forebears was August von Wassermann, the bacteriologist who in 1906 had devised the first reliable blood test for syphilis - a method for finding what the body conceals, for making the invisible legible. Portaluppi, who had his own ideas about surfaces and what lies beneath them, gave them exactly the house that followed. The façade is clad in grey and rose marble, but only at the piano nobile; above, it gives way to plain white plaster, as if the building had spent its grandeur early and was resting. Inside, fifteen varieties of marble - among them verde Roja, bianco di Carrara and rosso di Levanto. Along the garden façade, a helical staircase spirals upward, salvaged from a pavilion Portaluppi had shown at the Triennale di Milano in 1933. The windows are wide and horizontal, hungry for light. The rooms move between austerity and excess never quite deciding what they want to confess. Casa Corbellini-Wassermann exists in two registers at once - former home and exhibition space, private history and public present. A space suspended between what it was and what it is now, familiar and slightly elsewhere at the same time: a dislocated dwelling - _Dimora Dislocata._ It is here that Kwade assembled a world.