Photographic Work Exhibited in 'Quotidiana: The Continuity of the Everyday in 20th Century Art', Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (5 February - 21 May 2000) curated by Nicholas Serota, Ida Gianelli, Giorgio Verzotti, Jonathan Watkins and David Ross

Work from Billingham's photographic series 'Rays a Laugh' was exhibited in 'Quotidiana: The Continuity of the Everyday in 20th Century Art', Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (5 February - 21 May 2000) curated by Nicholas Serota, Ida Gianelli, Giorgio Verzotti, Jonathan Watkins and David Ross. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, avant-garde art has addressed everyday life, whether representing it literally, or alluding to it implicitly. Contrary to the preconception that the avant-garde is a form of cultural extremism divorced from reality, it is in the very heart of the quotidian and its most immediate manifestations that it has found a constant source of inspiration. This can also be detected in more current artistic expressions and characterises the work of many contemporary artists. “Quotidiana” presented an exhibition path that, beginning with the present, took a retrospective look back, showing works from different eras within the same context. The exhibition included Divisionist paintings by Giacomo Balla, Cubist collages by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, pre-Futurist portraits by Umberto Boccioni, ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp and merzbilder by Kurt Schwitters. In these artists’ works everyday time was captured in images of labor or in portraits in domestic interiors, or alluded to through the use of materials and objects pertaining to daily life. The ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies were other eras of experimentation that radically altered the history of the visual arts. They represented an important chapter in the development of the exhibition’s theme. This period was described through the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter and Christian Boltanski. The continuity of art and life was also confirmed in works by artists such as Nan Goldin, Grazia Toderi, Beat Streuli and Andrea Zittel, who in different ways drew upon the experience of the phenomenology of the real and on the realm of individuality and more personal feelings. There was a fully illustrated catalogue to the exhibition