As the spring exhibition season hits its stride, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art has come up with an accessible and quite interesting show in the diffusely titled "Chain of Visions -- Family, Politics and Religion in the Last Generation of Italian Contemporary Art." The exhibition features about 25 recent works in photography, sculpture, video, installation and painting by 12 Italian artists, most of whom are in their 20s or 30s.
The best known among the participating artists are probably Vanessa Beecroft, whose performance series "Show" (in which dozens of beautiful young models stand around in galleries half-naked) has made her one of the art world's media darlings; and Maurizio Cattelan, who scored at the 1999 Venice Biennale and has brought a couple of suicide-themed three-dimensional works to the current exhibition.
But Cattelan's "Bidibidobidiboo," which finds a stuffed squirrel slumped at a miniature table, a gun laying beside his tiny feet, comes off as little more than childish; while the Joseph Beuys allusion in the artist's "La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi," a self-portrait dummy wearing a felt suit and hanging by the neck from a coat rack, does nothing to improve a self-obsessed and feckless piece.