Sextus Marius, 1982
GPO-0477
Photo emulsion on canvas
137 x 204 cm (two parts 137 x 102 cm each)
Signed and dated on the verso of the second canvas, upper stretcher bar, right “Giulio Paolini 1982”
Noire Collection
In contrast to the ideal perspective foreshadowed by the specular colonnades in the double image of the Library of Pergamum, in the foreground the gaze drowns surrounded by the fragments of the torn image of The Galatian Suicide, scattered amidst the fragments of a lost architecture.
The work is part of a series of nine works, made between 1981 and 1982, in which each time the reproduction of the antique sculpture cited in the title is added to the landscape of ruins (GPO-0451, from GPO-0470 to GPO-0477). The group of works is related to the collages made in the same year for a book co-authored with René Denizot for the Galerie Yvon Lambert (De bouche à oreille / Hearsay, Paris 1982).
• Ludovisi Gaul (The Galatian Suicide), 1st century BC Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, marble, h 211 cm, Museo nazionale di Palazzo Altemps, Rome; reproduction from Francis Haskell, Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 283, fig. 149 (“Paetus and Arria”).
• Image of the ruins from Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 72.
| 2008 | Perugia, Museo di Palazzo della Penna, Viva l’Italia. L’arte italiana racconta le città tra nascita, sviluppo, crisi dal 1948 al 2008, 25 October 2008 - 11 January 2009, repr. p. 91, catalogue entry by R. Pagani p. 90. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 477 p. 489, repr. |
