Giulio Paolini: an artistic pick

 Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!

Today I'd like to introduce you an artist that has been associated with two quite interesting art movements, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. His name is Giulio Paolini and he is an italian artist who is best known for an artistic practice that is inscribed in a more strictly conceptual sphere.

Giulio Paolini

A little bit about him: Paolini was born in Genoa. He attended the Giambattista Bodoni State Industrial Technical School of Graphics and Photography, graduating in the Graphics department in 1959. Towards the end of the 1950s he approached painting, trying some pictures of abstract nature, close to monochrome. He did his first work in 1960, Disegno Geometrico (Geometrical Drawing).

Elegia - 1969

In the early 1960s, Paolini developed his research by focusing on the very components of the picture: on the painter's tools and on the space of representation. For his first solo show - in 1964 at Gian Tommaso Liverani;s La Salita gallery in Rome - he presented some rough wooden panels leant against or hanging on the wall, suggesting an exhibition in the process of being set up. Between 1967 and 1972, the critic Germano Celant invited him to take part in Arte Povera exhibitions which resulted in his name being associated with that movement.

His first official acknowledgements came with the 1970s: from shows abroad, which placed him on the international avant-garde gallery circuit, to his first museum exhibitions. In 1970 he took part in the Venice Biennale with Elegia (Elegy).

L'altra figura - 1984

From the outset of his career, Paolini has developed a complex research centred as much on the artist's tools as on the figure of the artist as an operator of language and accomplice of the viewer. The main characteristics of his artistic expression include citation, duplication and fragmentation, which are used as expedients for staging the distance between a finished model for making the work a 'theatre of evocation.' Articulated and composed designs, centred on additive dynamics (ordering, repetition, juxtaposition) and centrifugal forces, (explosions and dispersions starting from the centre) or centripetal ones (concentration, superimposition, joining), accompany the procedures drawing from a vast store of cultural mythologies and memories that are recaptured in photography, collage and plaster casts.

Lettere da Torin - 2008

More recently, Paolini's incessant investigation of the definition and purpose of the work has been insistently concerned with the act of exhibiting, which he sees as the fundamental moment of encountering the work. Giulio Paolini lives and works in Turin, Italy.

Paolini's career is an excellent example of an artist of this era that worked his way around the constant changes in the artistic world without losing sight of what he wanted to convey. His long career show all the examples of the gradual change and level up that he experienced through hsi years of work, remaining even after all these years relevant and in sync with the contemporary arts and changes that rule our era today.

Immacolata Consezione - 2008

I hope you found him as interesting as I did! I do prefer artworks similar to his aesthetic, clean and graphic without too much information through the artwork. And I'm really fond of the fact that he decided to experiment with his art skills, creating still art that is his, without shifting to the commercial art  and losing part of his individual identity as an artist that we might be seeing happening today.

As always thank you for reading and I will see you in a next post!

xoxoxo