Lorenzo Vitturi's Dalston Anatomy Exhibition Critiques Gentrification Through Market Imagery

Lorenzo Vitturi's exhibition Dalston Anatomy, reviewed on artreview.com in 2014, centers on the Ridley Road street market in Dalston, East London. The Italian artist, a former cinema set painter, created photographs, photomontages, and three installations using market goods like fruit, vegetables, textiles, and trinkets. His studio work involved building unstable structures from produce, some left to rot or pigmented, then photographing them, evoking comparisons to Fischli & Weiss's 1984 series Equilibres / Quiet Afternoon. A large carpet in the gallery features a poem by local poet Sam Berkson, incorporating fragments of overheard conversations. Vitturi's highly aestheticized installations mimic market stalls with meticulous color sense, but portraits of local people positioned next to vegetables, sometimes with faces overlaid to match objects, raise political concerns. The project aims to capture the area's distinctive nature before gentrification, yet critics note it risks reducing residents to commodities, presenting them as exotic elements rather than subjective individuals. The exhibition's imagery reflects the market's fast-changing temporality and serves as a memento mori for its commercial decline, potentially romanticizing a deprived socio-economic area.