Venere dei Medici, 1982
GPO-0472
The Medici Venus
Photo emulsion on canvas
137 x 204 cm (two parts 137 x 102 cm each)
Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Turin
Gift of the artist, 25 October 2012, archive no. GPO-0472
The two canvases should be placed at short intervals from each other.
Two photographic canvases placed side by side reproduce the same view of the ruins of the Library of Pergamum, doubled specularly so that the trajectory of the divergent colonnades evokes a visual angle. The landscape of ruins serves as a backdrop to the mise-en-scène of a specular pair of the Medici Venus: the figure reproduced in positive finds itself looking at a copy of itself in the negative.
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).
- Cleomenes son of Apollodorus, Medici Venus, late 1st century BC, marble, h 153 cm, Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence; 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. 327, fig. 173 (”Venus de’ Medici”).
• Image of the ruins from Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 72.
| 1971-72 | Milan, Galleria Christian Stein, Giulio Paolini. Fine, 10 November 2016 - 29 April 2017, cited in the checklist of exhibited works p. 152, col. repr. pp. 38, 40-41 (exhibition views), entry by M. Disch p. 152; exhibited at the venue in Pero. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 472 p. 484, , repr. |
| • | Giulio Paolini. A come Accademia, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2023), col. repr. pp. 272-273 (exhibition view Milan 2016). |
