Scheduled to open on April 13, 2024, at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano, «I just don’t like eggs!» Andrea Fraser on collectors, collecting, collections is the first solo exhibition ever devoted by an Italian institution to the research of artist, writer and thinker Andrea Fraser (USA, 1965).

Curated by Andrea Viliani with Vittoria Pavesi, the exhibition is the first survey solely dedicated to Fraser’s works investigating collectors, collecting, the art market, and the intersections between private and public collections. The project includes works spanning the artist’s overall research, from the late 80s to her recent productions, including a new artwork especially conceived for this exhibition. Taken from the script of Fraser’s performance May I help you?, the title «I just don’t like eggs!» evokes the language and mentality of collecting as an enactment of taste, desire, distinction, possession, categorization, negation, exclusivity, and the exercise of choice as an expression of power.

One of the most radical and influential artists of her generation, Fraser's pioneering work in institutional critique investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural organizations, fields, groups, and individuals. Performatively embodying the data that she generates through her research, Fraser’s practice is as physical and affective as it is critical and intellectual, working through humor and pathos as well as analysis. Her discursive practice employs staged discussions, performative actions, scripts, data, and museum incursions as devices to shift the art system’s standards and to critically redefine our relations to them. The artist’s sociological and psychoanalytic approach becomes the lens for questioning the art world and highlighting its contradictions, projections, wills, and wishes.

The frame of the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare – a non-profit institution that stemmed from a private collection with a focus on mostly Western lines of research, such as the Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and Minimal Art – represents the starting point for an exhibition that analyzes the very concept of art as a commodity and the layered and often contradictory dynamics of ownership between artists and collectors while exposing the structural connections between the art market and wealth concentration, as well as between art and politics. Fraser’s exhibition represents the opportunity to re conceptualize culture, class, privilege, and their systemic institutionalization, and to re-think our positions in the art field by re-imagining structures and relations within it.

Beginning in the Foundation's entrance, intended for the reception of visitors, the exhibition develops mainly in the ground floor's Commission Room. It then occupies and infiltrates other areas of the institution - sometimes as a hyper text, sometimes as a meta-exhibition - including the collection galleries, the library, the halls and corridors, and the outdoor courtyard. «I just don't like eggs!» unfolds in space to mirror the works it contains, namely as a critical analysis and narrative unveiling of the mechanics of the art system. This also defines the institution itself that contains it, its collection, its architectural spaces, its programme and its practical functions.