Venice Biennale 2013

The centre piece of the Biennale was The Encyclopedic Palace -as the catalogue explains it.... ' in 1955 a self taught American artist Marino Auriti filed a design  with the US patent office depicting his Palazzo Enciclopedia an imaginary museum that was meat to house all worldy knowledge... from the wheel to the satellite"

He worked on a model of the palace -  which was to take up over 16 blocks in Washington DC-  in his garage in the middle of the Pennsylvania country side for many years.

So we found that as we viewed the biennale, that many works were those of obsessive 'amateurs' (as well as established artists) creating works to make sense of their inner or outer worlds.

The first work we encountered was attributed to the artist Oliver Croy and architect Oliver Elser. The work  was a display of 387 model buildings they found in a junk shop - created in fact by an Austrian  insurance clerk Peter Fritz. A 'near encyclopedic inventory of provincial architecture' and a miniature production of the world, 'built perhaps so that its maker could better appreciate [the world] through his imaginative creation" 

 

 

 

The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz (1916- 2008)