Sbagliato's Vertigo Installation at Varsi Gallery

Since 2011, the collective Sbagliato has been pasting hyperrealistic windows on walls in Rome and other cities at night, creating a Kafkaesque sense of dislocation. Their new exhibition at Varsi Gallery in Rome, curated by Chiara Pietropaoli, marks a shift: it features backlit photographic prints of staircases shot from below. The centerpiece is a large installation—a rectangular stairwell placed horizontally, defying gravity and perception, which visitors can physically enter and walk through. At the far end, the artists have affixed one of their posters, a photograph of the remaining stair portion whose vanishing lines create an architectural illusion reminiscent of Bramante's choir in San Satiro or Borromini's Galleria Spada. The show's title, "Vertigine," evokes the final scene of Hitchcock's Vertigo, where the camera moves vertically within a scale model while the lens zooms to exaggerate height. Sbagliato remains faithful to their method of decontextualizing architectural elements, as catalogued by Rem Koolhaas in his Biennale. The installation runs until November 13, 2016.