Background
Paolini was born in Genoa, Italy, on November 5, 1940.
Giulio Paolini with one of his works.
Piazza Museo, 19, 80135 Napoli NA, Italy
Giulio Paolini at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Photo by Luciano-Romano.
Giulio Paolini
Giulio Paolini photographed by Marco-Ghidelli.
Giulio Paolini in 1995. Photo by Matteo Piazza.
Giulio Paolini at work.
Giulio Paolini
Paolini was born in Genoa, Italy, on November 5, 1940.
Giulio Paolini was interested in art from an early age; he visited museums and galleries and read art periodicals. After a childhood spent in Bergamo, Paolini moved with his family to Turin. He went on to study graphic design at the Giambattista Bodoni State Industrial Technical School of Graphics and Photography. He graduated from it in 1959.
Towards the end of the 1950s, Paolini turned to painting. He created several pictures of an abstract nature, close to monochrome. He did his first work in 1960, Disegno geometrico (Geometrical Drawing). 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, which was held at Gian Tommaso Liverani’s La Salita gallery in Rome in 1964, he presented some rough wooden panels leaned against or hanging on the wall. The exhibition was visited by Carla Lonzi and Marisa Volpi who wrote the first critical texts on the young artist.
Giulio Paolini started to use photography as part of his exploration of the relationship between artist and object in 1965. The same year, through Carla Lonzi, Paolini met Luciano Pistoi, the owner of the Galleria Notizie in Turin. Pistoi introduced him to a new circle of friends and collectors and became his main dealer until the beginning of the 1970s. In the late 1960s, Giulio Paolini became one of the leading figures in the Arte Povera movement, despite the fact that his approach to art was distinct from his peers.
Between 1967 and 1972, the critic Germano Celant invited Paolini to participate in Arte Povera exhibitions. It resulted in his name being associated with the movement. During the 1970s, the artist increasingly focused on a comprehensive investigation of the artistic canon. He began reproducing details from artworks by such masters as Diego Velázquez and Praxiteles. He either broke up or reassembled these details, or treated them like readymades.
Giulio Paolini’s references to Classicism and Neo-Classicism, together with his use of plaster casts, served to underline his notions about the connection of past and present and played on ideas of replication versus creativity. Among his main references in those years were Jorge Luis Borges, to whom he paid homage on several occasions, and Giorgio de Chirico from whom he borrowed the constituent phrase of the work Et.quid.amabo.nisi.quod.ænigma est (1969).
In 1970 the artist participated in the Venice Biennale with Elegia (Elegy, 1969). It was the first artwork in which he used the plaster cast of a classic subject: the eye of Michelangelo’s David with a fragment of mirror applied to the pupil. In the 1970s, his works became more conceptual, focused on the systems of creating and exhibiting art.
The period most dense in exhibitions and retrospectives, with the publication of his important monographs, was during the 1980s. He has created sets and costumes for theater productions, including projects designed by Carlo Quartucci in the 1980s and two Wagner works directed by Federico Tiezzi.
In the late 1980s, Giulio Paolini’s reflections turned mainly on the act of exhibiting itself. He had his solo show at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes in 1987, where the concept of the exhibition became progressively configured as the actual subject of the works themselves.
In the 2000s, another theme became especially important to Paolini: the identity of the author, his condition as a spectator, his lack of contact with a work that always precedes and supersedes him. Among his most recent exhibitions should be mantioned the following: at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Palazzo Forti, Verona, in 2001; Fondazione Prada, Milan, in 2003; the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, in 2005; the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 2005. In 2014 the Whitechapel Gallery in London staged Giulio Paolini: To Be or Not To Be, an exhibition of Paolini's sculptures, exhibitions and installations.
Today the artist lives and works in Turin, Italy.
Quotations: "I am attracted even to those works [of Giorgio de Chirico] that critics generally despise, the ones after his Metaphysical period. He is an artist who has always worked for himself, indifferent to the critiques and mockery that his work has elicited."