Diego Bianchi:

Errores Irreales

18.10.2025–18.1.2026

The ​“body” is under pressure. There is little that is so close and essential to us as the idea and the substance of the body, and at the same time so shapeable and vulnerable. Thus it is not surprising that not only the perception and interpretation of the body in general has become so diverse and controversial, but also its depiction in sculpture, whose traditional approaches to materiality, shaping, hybridity, and fluidity are all now being redefined. Today there are new paths in sculpture that aim to better grasp in form our contemporary sense of the body and its diverse interpretations.

In recent years Diego Bianchi has become a central figure in the art scene in Argentina. His large-scale immersive sculptural installations reinterpret the concepts of sculpture and of the torso, taking seriously the sensitivity and distress of the human body as subjected to manifold pressures, and expanding and updating its forms of expression. The place of the body in society, exposed to all the increasing demands of our time, plays a key role. Bianchi works primarily with found objects from his own environment, drawing our attention to the excesses and wastage of contemporary consumer culture.

For Errores Irreales, his exhibition with installations and performances at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Bianchi arranges thrown-away objects found in the urban spaces of Buenos Aires, Paris, and above all Graz, such as parts of automobiles, metal and plastic items, fashion, and trash in well selected variants. During his research and material collection, Bianchi follows specific preferences that depend on the moment and context, and then realizes an extensive production process. The result is a stage-set-like landscape of sculptures and installation interventions that refer unsettlingly to the body and its internal organs, and meld in various overlapping settings – sometimes activated by performers – into a ​“vague whole” that becomes paradigmatic of our times.

As the title Errores Irreales suggests, Bianchi is here attempting to bring together seemingly opposite worlds in overlaps and interaction within an unreal and defamiliarized setting. There are fragments of shop-window mannequins and consumer goods that in their new context and usage highlight the absurdity of our fascination for the world of commodities. Bianchi is interested in the ways in which we are connected with these objects and how they influence our daily lives. Observing how used everyday objects are here transformed, we also note mutual influences between nature and social behavior, the rise and fall of urban and biological developments, like catastrophes, accidents, and coincidences that are able to create hitherto unknown forms of order. Bianchi focusses on consumer chains, and the lifecycles of objects such as furniture and other possessions that every society shapes anthropogenically in its own way.

Bianchi reads the passing of time in the traces of usage and heuristics of objects, in order to then draw conclusions about specific phenomena and systems. Reacting to direct, usually urban, environments, which the artist understands as organisms, he begins with the human body, which he takes out of form and expands in a huge variety of ways. He places the body together with other ​“bodies” and objects in unfamiliar positions and constellations within a ​“social field” that the artist has thus activated. He does not distinguish between human bodies and formable things, and his installations thereby reconfigure our perception of a ​“sculptural” image of the body, while his torsos comprise numerous variations including cyborg-like interventions that remind us of familiar objects. His entire practice is based on an understanding of the social that derives not merely from interhuman relations but also relations between other living beings, objects, and symbols. He thus sees the social as constituted within a far more diverse picture than that of a society that – in sociological terms – consists only of intersubjective relations. In this practice, he is a thinker akin to Bruno Latour, looking at varieties of objects, forms, and influences that take effect on our human existence and seeing this in relationship and intertwined with these. With this perspective, Bianchi wishes to lay bare the anthropomorphic, human-like characteristics of objects and also our relationship with them – by means of exploring our desires and revulsions concerning them.

Diego Bianchi sees each of his projects as an extraordinary adventure in which he connects his own direct impressions, experiences, and his knowledge with reality, viewing the latter from a critical perspective as something isolated and ​“foreign,” taking it apart and reshaping it as something ​“other.” This produces a kaleidoscopic and apocalyptic reflection of reality whose artistic representation based on the recognizability of aesthetic conventions and markers (luxury) and the depiction of physical deformities (decay) is both attractive and repulsive at the same time. A sculpture of sculptures, or Errores Irreales: art works against aesthetics and transience in order to create precisely these.