Chiara Dynys and Sean Shanahan Homage to Giuseppe Panza at Villa Panza

Villa Panza in Varese, owned by FAI since 1996, reopens after five months of closure due to the health emergency with a major homage exhibition to Count Giuseppe Panza, eleven years after his death and one year after the twentieth anniversary of the collection's opening to the public. The exhibition 'Sudden Time' features Chiara Dynys and Sean Shanahan, running until September 5, 2021. Dynys created four new large site-specific installations in symbolic spaces of the villa, all related to the theme of light-spaces, identified by curator Giorgio Verzotti (together with Anna Bernardini) as one of four semantic fields of her work. Dynys's project focuses on light as the primary substance where everything happens. In the late 1990s, she met Panza and created 'Glitter Gates' and 'Dietro di sé' for the villa park. Her works include 'Camini delle Fate' inside the small stable, the video projection 'Melancholia', and two large sculptures both titled 'Giuseppe's Door'. One is an opalescent glass door over 60 cm high that dematerializes and absorbs surrounding light colors; the other, for the garden, is made of photosensitive Murano glass and corten steel, which charges with light and releases it in the dark. Dynys describes the work as constructing an ideal crossing that speaks of the threshold.