Arianna, 1982
GPO-0474
Ariadne
Photo emulsion on canvas
137 x 204 cm (two parts 137 x 102 cm each)
Titled, signed, and dated on the verso of the second canvas, upper stretcher bar: " "Arianna" Giulio Paolini 1982"
Private collection
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 the Sleeping Ariadne, who in analogy with her sad fate – according to the Greek myth, Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus while she slept – lies on the ground upside down, fallen into ruin like the ancient colonnade of Pergamon that crumbled.
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).
- Sleeping Ariadne, 1st-2nd century AD Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, marble, 161 cm, Musei Vaticani, 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. 185, fig. 96 (“Cleopatra”).
• Image of the ruins from Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 72.
| 2016-17 | New York, Center for Italian Modern Art, Giorgio de Chirico – Giulio Paolini / Giulio Paolini – Giorgio de Chirico, 14 October 2016 - 24 June 2017, col. repr. pp. 34 (exhibition view), 36. |
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 474 p. 486, repr. |
