Giulio Paolini (1940)
Italy
Biography :
"Born in 1940 in Genoa (Italy)
lives and works in Turin (Italy)
Giulio Paolini is an Italian artist whose work has often been linked to the Arte Povera movement even though his concerns place it more in the conceptual sphere. His work has benefited from numerous exhibitions in Europe and around the world, such as at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1980, at the Castillo di Rivoli in 1986, at the Kunst Museum in Winterthur in 2005 as well as in New York (MoMA, 1985) or Los Angeles (MOCA, 1995). He has also participated on several occasions in prestigious artistic events such as the Cassel documenta (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992) or the Venice Biennale (on different occasions between 1970 and 2013). The works of Giulio Paolini were also presented in Venice, at Palazzo Grassi as part of Italics (2008-2009) and Where are We Going? (2006) and at Punta della Dogana on the occasion of the exhibitions Prima Materia (2013-15) and Dancing with Myself (2018).
After a childhood spent in Bergamo, his family decided to settle in Turin, where he still lives. There he developed a growing interest in art and studied at the Giambattista Bodoni State Industrial Technical School of Graphics and Photography from which he graduated in 1959. Now famous, his first work, entitled Disegno geometrico and dated 1960, also illustrates precociously and exemplarily the conceptual and aesthetic issues of his future practice. With this simple grid drawn on a white canvas, Paolini makes the preliminary phase of any figuration the work itself, in an analytical approach aimed at revealing the constituent elements of the painting.
From 1962 and more particularly in his first personal exhibition in 1964 at the Galleria la Salita in Rome, he developed a series of works questioning the place of the painting in space: his bare or embedded canvases present the “picture as image of itself”. From 1965, Paolini used photography, as much for its objectivity as for the temporality that it introduced into the work. Diaframma 8 or Delfo (both 1965), for example, feature the artist carrying a painting down the street or hiding behind a frame. During the 1970s, he multiplied references to classical Antiquity by mixing traditional techniques and contemporary formats (installations, performances, furniture, collages, etc.). The double, the copy and the fragment become increasingly recurring figures for him, as evidenced by Early Dynastic (1971), Mimesi (1975-1976), where two identical plaster casts of Venus face each other and reveal the ambiguity of the copy) or even Lo Sguardo della Medusa (1980) which presents the scattered fragments of a broken bust accompanied by a diagram, testifying to his deep interest in the phenomenology of perception. From the Universal Exhibition (1994-1997) and until the 2000s, Paolini focused his thinking more on the concept of exhibition and the relationship between the spectator and the work in increasingly complex installations, and often in situ, between minimalist economy and philosophical aspirations inherited from Antiquity."
(Source, website, Contemporary Art Institute of Villeurbanne)