Giulio Paolini

Giulio Paolini was born in Genoa in 1940 and lives in Turin. Often associated with the arte povera movement, he is distinguished by artistic practices that belong to a more strictly conceptual context (…) Paolini developed complex research centred as much on the tools of artistic creation as on the figure of the artist as language operator and the spectator’s accomplice. Marked by a declared theatricality his works stage the awaiting of an unknown image which, in search of a model at once new and ancient, constantly eludes its own definition. Citation, duplication and fragmentation – employed as expedients for staging the distance from the finished model and for making the work a "theatre of evocation" – are among the main features of his modus operandi. Pendants to these procedures – which draw on a vast repertoire of mythology and cultural memories recovered through photography, collage and plaster casting – are well-constructed and composite exhibition set-ups, turning on dynamics that are additive (seriality, repetition, juxtaposition), centrifugal (explosion and dispersion from the centre) or centripetal (concentration, overlaying, interlocking). In recent times Paolini’s incessant inquiry into the definition and reason of the work is centred, with particular insistence, around the act of the exhibition, understood as a fundamental moment of encounter with the work. Maddalena Disch This book is the catalog of Paolini’s solo show at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna (January-March 2008).