Common Perspective by Esther Stocker

MAXXI and ATAC bring contemporary art out of the museum on the reopening of Rome’s Vittorio Emanuele Metro A station.

Esther Stocker, one of the 19 artists featured at MAXXI in the exhibition Ambienti 1956 – 2010. Environments by women artists II, completely reinvents the station space with the site-specific work Common Perspective (2024).

Esther Stocker
Common Perspective, 2024
Black tape, white film
Courtesy the artist

Common Perspective is the public artwork designed by Esther Stocker for Vittorio Emanuele Station’s atrium.

Black tape on a white background covers the walls, ceiling, pillars and access devices according to a dense system of orthogonal lines; a series of geometric elements anchored to the ceiling and arranged on the ground along the aisles of this metropolitan cathedral intensify the effect of multiplying planes that intercept the gaze of passers-by. The marked grid structure completely transforms the room’s appearance, producing a perspective movement of horizontal and vertical surfaces. Passers-by walking through the station entrance area in all directions, thanks to their personal perception of the space, become an indispensable element to activate the work and grasp the disorientation and ambiguity often caused by the surrounding reality. The term “perspective” contained in the title refers to the system of graphic elaboration followed to design the work and, at the same time, to the idea of a vision that tends towards the future, a point near or far towards which the people who pass through this unconscious and fast-moving meeting place project their gaze.

The structure of black-and-white lines and surfaces conceived by Stocker for the Vittorio Emanuele station’s atrium echoes her first environmental work, realised in Bolzano in 2004 and redesigned in 2024 for Gallery 4 of the MAXXI museum in the context of the exhibition Ambienti 1956-2010. Environments by Women Artists II.