Giulio Paolini

Giulio Paolini has spent sixty years making work about the moment before a work begins: the blank canvas, the stretcher, the artist's own absence. This bilingual volume is the clearest recent account of how that programme reads across half a century.

Published by Quodlibet in 2014 to document two linked exhibitions: at MACRO in Rome, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, and at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, curated by Daniel F. Herrmann. The shows brought together 23 works spanning 1965 to 2013, including a piece conceived for the occasion; each is catalogued in an entry by Maddalena Disch, keeper of the artist's catalogue raisonné. Critical texts come from the two curators and from Gabriele Guercio, Barry Schwabsky and Ilaria Bernardi, with a contribution by Paolini himself, who states the position plainly: the artist does not wish to speak or to communicate directly, but to listen, to catch an echo. 168 pages, softcover with flaps, 240 × 280 mm, in Italian and English.

Paolini, born in Genoa in 1940 and long resident in Turin, is usually filed with Arte Povera but works closer to conceptual practice, building from citation, duplication and fragmentation: plaster casts of antique heads, doubled photographs, canvases turned to face the wall.