Diego Marcon Krapfen

With the opening of the exhibition Krapfen by Diego Marcon, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the New Museum in New York launch the first edition of the New Futures Production Fund, an annual program supporting the realization of an important new artwork. Diego Marcon is one of the most internationally recognized Italian artists, thanks to a practice that reflects on the structure of cinematic language and rethinks the relationship between moving image, space, and sound. His works draw on classic genres such as horror, the musical, slapstick comedy, and melodrama, spanning references from structural film to popular entertainment. Marcon reworks this vocabulary by combining different registers to construct an unsettling imaginary world inhabited by characters that are at once real and synthetic, human and inanimate.

Krapfen is the first work produced through the New Futures Production Fund, a multi-year collaboration between Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the New Museum. Under the guidance of Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum, the initiative involves the co-production and presentation of a new artwork at both institutions.

Krapfen features a young boy of ambiguous gender, played by Violet Savage, and four garments: a pair of gloves, a scarf, a pair of trousers, and a sweater. The work unfolds as a musical and draws inspiration from the golden age of American animation and Italian opera. The musical score, composed by Federico Chiari, a long-time collaborator of the artist, leads the characters into a frenetic choreography in which the four garments urge the boy to eat a krapfen. As often happens in Marcon’s works, the childlike setting is accompanied by an alarmed and unsettling atmosphere, where a sweet pastry becomes the device for summoning emotions of terror and annihilation.

Krapfen was commissioned and produced through the collaboration between Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Lafayette Anticipations, the New Museum, the Renaissance Society, and The Vega Foundation, with additional support from Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.