Bizhan Bassiri, representative of the Republic of Iran at the 57th Venice International Biennale of Art in 2017, returns to the lagoon city with the installation Meteorite Narvalo in Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, during the week of the 2019 Biennale.
The ten-metre-high bronze colossus is a manifestation of Bassiri’s visceral, three-dimensional, atavistic conception of “magmatic thought” and the Manifesto of Magmatic Thought, which he formulated in Rome in the early 1980s. With particular reference to points 10 and 49 of the Manifesto, the artist states, “The existence of the work of art in the world is a meteorite arriving from the cosmos, it does not belong to the Earth but appears to it.”

The inspiration for the project, begun in 2009, came from a view of the crater of Mt Vesuvius in 1979, which led the artist to elaborate the correspondence between the artist’s creative process of transforming matter and the planet’s volcanic activity. Meteorite Narvalo represents this suspension between the terrestrial and celestial dimensions and is the synthesis of an impressive repertoire of sculptures created over the years, evocative of the fall of meteorites as a phenomenon with metaphorical and poetic implications.
Greeting visitors at Ca’ Pesaro, Meteorite Narvalo introduces them to the sublime, opening the doors to the ascent of the “treasure that emerges from the depths with ardour”, just as the sculpture coils around itself and turns to gold, aiming ever upward towards the sky.