Ilaria Bernardi
GIULIO PAOLINI

Description

This volume is the first study dedicated to the works on paper created by Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940), one of the best known and most successful Italian artists on an international level. With reference to his activity, the term “works on paper” designates a corpus of drawings and small and medium-sized collages, hitherto unexplored, largely unpublished and never the subject of scientific research, or publications, or reasoned cataloging. This first monograph on the subject investigates the actual creative process of the artist, bringing to light for the first time his distinctive gestures, iconographic and conceptual sources, as well as the value of the materials used. He focuses on his first twenty years of activity on paper, from 1960 to 1980, as, unlike the subsequent activity, it constitutes a more independent laboratory from the other types of production he made in the same years – that is paintings, sculptures, installations and graphic editions -, revealing at the same time a gestural repertoire that underlies the value he attributes to drawing. Numerous and unpublished statements by Paolini collected by the author complete the reading of the works examined and constitute an important testimony for the present and for the future.