Studio per “Quadri di un’esposizione”, 2013
GPE-0128
Study for “Quadri di un’esposizione”
Silkscreen
Fedrigoni Old Mill 300 g
33.5 x 48 cm
Signed on the verso, bottom right: “Giulio Paolini”
Autograph numbering on the verso, bottom right corner
50 in Arabic numerals from 1/50 to 50/50
14 in Roman numerals from I/XIV to XIV/XIV
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Rome
Stefano Tinto, Rome; Tipolitografia Trullo, Rome
The print is part of the portfolio produced as a gift for the participants in a crowdfunding campaign promoted in the spring of 2013 by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi – curator of the exhibition Vice versa presented at the Italian Pavilion for the 55th Venice Biennale – to finance the artists' works, cultural mediation, the production and communication of the exhibition project, in accordance with the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. The portfolio contains one work by each of the fourteen artists participating in the exhibition: Francesco Arena, Massimo Bartolini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Elisabetta Benassi, Flavio Favelli, Luigi Ghirri, Piero Golia, Francesca Grilli, Marcello Maloberti, Fabio Mauri, Giulio Paolini, Marco Tirelli, Luca Vitone, and Sislej Xhafa.
Includes information regarding the critical essay, graphic designer, plates, edition size, printing technique, type of paper, and printer.
This print reproduces the project for the large-scale work titled Quadri di un’esposizione (GPO-1030), made for the Italian Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale.
The drawing in perspective depicts a space with a gallery of square modules on the walls, arranged at regular intervals in four parallel orders; some of the elements at the back include images (of an overturned canvas, a gilt frame, a partial view of the sky), as if they were the pieces of a mosaic in fieri. Standing out at the centre is a large modular structure – a sort of exhibition container – while in the foreground a plinth serves as the support for a case, whose sides are articulated by a grid with square modules.
An exhibition of paintings, an exhibition stage brought to life by an organization of square modules: no matter which paintings nor which exhibition. what is of interest here is the mental vision of a parallel world. In the author's own words: “The Pictures at an Exhibition announced in the title, in addition to the ones that are visible, drawn from one end of the wall to another, all recall other paintings that the virtual space drawn in perspective allows us to intuit... Eventually presuming that there is a numerical and combinatory 'summa' capable of extending beyond every limit".1
The original collage from which the print originates is part of the nine Studi per “Quadri di un’esposizione”, documented in the online Catalogue Raisonné of the works on paper at number GPC-1409 (cf. also the preliminary study for number GPC-1415).
1 G. Paolini, unpublished text written when the work Quadri di un’esposizione, 2013, was made. Typescript held in the artist's archive.
Title from the piano suite by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Paintings at an Exhibition, 1874.
