GIULIO PAOLINI

Librairie Marian Goodman is pleased to present an exhibition devoted to Giulio Paolini’s early printed editions and multiples, focusing on the first ten years of production from 1967 to 1977. Paolini, who has just been awarded this year’s Japanese Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award in Painting, is also taking part in the group exhibition Renverser ses Yeux at Jeu de Paume and at Le Bal in Paris from 11 October 2022 to 29 January 2023.

The artist’s limited editions, which he began in 1967, include approximately 150 works. Since his first works in the early 1960s, Paolini has oriented his practice towards a conceptual dimension, drawing attention to the elements that make up the painting, the space of the representation, the relationship between the work and the viewer, as well as to the figure of the author. Over the course of time, the artist’s oeuvre has led him to include the ‘act of the exhibition’ and the artist’s studio as the space where the work comes into being. Paolini’s frame of reference is the classical tradition of beauty and the metaphysical dimension of art, far removed from the evolution of the world and of life as we know it.

Comprising a predominantly consistent range of materials (photographs, plaster cast, drawing paper, Plexiglas, objects, graphics and books), Paolini’s works dialogue with Time and History. Each possesses a complex structure that references art history or literature, forming a coherent and polysemous whole composed of a set of fragments. It is through our attentive observation of each detail that we can gain a reading of the complete composition, exceeding our initial perception of the work itself.

The exhibition presents 13 works including printed editions, artist’s books and multiples, personally selected by the artist. The ensemble highlights how the conceptual research developed by Paolini in the sixties and seventies is brilliantly mapped out and summarised in the editions; in some instances, they were realised in parallel with paintings, sculptures or collages bearing the same title.

Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1940, Giulio Paolini lives and works in Turin. He made his first ‘painting,’ Disegno geometrico, in 1960 and had his first solo exhibition in Italy in 1964. In the mid-1960s, he became associated with the Italian artists of the Arte Povera movement and took part in numerous group shows. He has also had solo shows in major international institutions such as the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli (2020); the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan (2016); the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York (2016); the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2014); the MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea) in Rome (2013); the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2005); MAMCO in Geneva (1999); the Fundação C. Gulbenkian in Lisbon (1995); the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1980). In France he was invited by the Nouveau Musée de Villeurbanne (1984) and by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1978).

A major solo exhibition, Giulio Paolini. Quando è il presente? has just ended at the Museo Novecento in Florence. Paolini has shown at several Documenta (V, 1972; VI, 1977; VII, 1982, and IX, 1992) and at numerous Venice Biennales (1970, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1995, 1997 and 2013). He has also designed many stage sets since 1969, including one for the opera Die Walkürie by Richard Wagner at the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, in 2005.