Untitled (Dream) 2009

Gian Maria Tosatti created this ‘Untitled (Dream)’ sometime after 1980, perhaps in Italy, using the materials to hand. This is not so much a sculpture or a piece of design, more a reflection on the social role of institutions in shaping our lives. Here we see a bed frame, the occupant long gone, suspended against a crumbling wall, and enclosed by an ethereal screen. This could be an institutional setting – a hospital, a prison, a school. The artist offers a social critique. The bed is a place of rest and dreams, but also a space in which social norms are enforced, and individual freedoms curtailed. To understand Tosatti's intentions more fully, scholars might research the history of penal institutions or mental asylums, comparing them to contemporary theories of social control. Ultimately, our reading of art is always shaped by the conditions in which the work was made, displayed, and received.