Pendant, 1979-80
GPO-0430
Pencil and collage on primed canvas, o reversed canvas and on wall
Four canvases 60 x 60 cm each, overall dimensions site-specific
Gori Collection, Fattoria di Celle, Santomato (Pistoia)
The work installed on two opposite walls in a room involves for each of them a perspectival drawing, which repeats the spatial framing of the wall and contains the profile of a female figure with a laurel leaves diadem. The figure is holding a pair of canvases, one viewed from the recto, the other from the verso, whose position is inverted in the passage from one wall and another (the drawing of the hands continues onto the canvas). The laurel leaves applied at random to the wall – some of which echo the diadem that encircles the head of the drawn figure – are echoed in the photograph fragments in the shape of a leaf, cut out from reproductions of previous exhibitions by the artist, distributed over the two canvases.
The same theme was formulated in 1979 in a first variant with smaller canvases and without the laurel leaf collage (GPO-0409), as well as in a smaller format made in 1980 (GPO-0841).
Figure from Davide Bertolotti, L’Italia descritta e dipinta con le sue isole di Sicilia, Sardinia, Elba, Malta, Eolie, di Calipso, ecc. 2 (Turin: Giuseppe Pomba e C., 1837-38), plate 14 (“Pitture antiche. Pompei. Peintures Antiques”).
| 1980 | Venice, Giardini di Castello, Biennale di Venezia: XXXIX Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte. L’arte degli anni Settanta, 1 June - 30 September, repr. p. 41 (exhibition view). |
| • | G. Minelli, “Giuliano Gori. Dans l’aire des Médicis”, in Galeries Magazine 31 (Paris), June-July, 1989, col. repr. p. 129 (installation view at Gori Collection, partial view); republished in Art Collectors. Volume 1 (Paris: Éditions Numéro 5, 1990), col. repr. p. 87. |
| • | Arte ambientale. Collezione Gori Fattoria di Celle (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., 1993), col. repr. pp. 288-289 (installation view at Gori Collection), anonymous entry p. 479. |
| • | Historia y Naturaleza. History and Nature. La Colección Gori – The Gori Collection Fattoria di Celle, exhibition catalogue, Valencia, IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 2003, col. repr. p. 208 (installation view at Gori Collection, detail). |
| • | L.V. Masini, L’arte del Novecento. Dall’Espressionismo al Multimediale, vol. XI: L’Arte come idea (Florence-Rome: Giunti and Gruppo Editoriale Espresso, 2003), col. repr. no. 2860 p. 560 (installation view at Gori Collection). |
| • | A. Zevi, Peripezie del dopoguerra nell’arte italiana (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2005), p. 550, not repr. |
| • | Fattoria di Celle. Collezione Gori. Un percorso nell’arte ambientale (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2007), entry by M, Mc Phail p. 156, col. repr. cat. no. 45 pp. 156-157 (installation view at Gori Collection, dated “1983” with reference to the date of installation of the work in the Gori Collection), cited in the list of works from the collection p. 254. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 430 p. 441, col. repr. (installation view at Gori Collection). |
