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Giulio Paolini

SELECTED WORKS
Hierapolis
1983
Lithograph on paper

19 9/16 x 27 9/16 inches (50 x 70 cm)
Edition of 150, AP
Signed, dated, and titled recto
(Inventory #35481)

Les fausses confidences
1983
A portfolio with twelve lithographs

Paper size (each): 19 x 13 5/16 inches (48 x 34 cm)
Edition of 100
Signed and numbered on colophon
(Inventory #35482)

Nove particolari in due tempi (Nine Details in Two Stages)
1984
Silkscreen and pencil on folded paper in nine parts

Overall arrangement size: 39 5/16 x 59 inches (100 x 150 cm)
Paper size (each): 6 9/16 x 9 1/2 inches (17 x 24 cm)
Edition of 60
Signed and numbered recto in graphite
(Inventory #35483)

L’annello immaginario
1989
Colored pencil and collage on die-cut paper

Image/paper size: 13 x 8 1/4 inches (33 x 21 cm)
Edition of 120, AP
Signed lower right and numbered lower left in graphite
(Inventory #30647)

Galleria (2) [Gallery (2)]
1991
Die-cut and lithograph on folded board

15 1/2 x 52 inches (39.5 x 132 cm)
Edition of 50
Signed and dated recto bottom right in graphite
(Inventory #35485)

Esposizione universale
1992
Collage, lithograph, and screenprint on paper

Image/paper size: 19 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (50 x 35 cm)
Edition of 25, AP
Signed and numbered recto in white pencil
(Inventory #35486)

Les aventures de la dialectique (III)
1992
Lithograph on paper

Image size: 9 3/8 x 6 5/8 inches (23.8 x 16.8 cm)
Paper size: 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21 cm)
Edition of 10
Signed and numbered lower center in graphite
(Inventory #30937)

Phoenix
1993
Silkscreen and pencil on Fabriano Rosaspina paper in nine parts

Overall arrangement size (approximately): 59 x 82 5/8 inches (150 x 210 cm)
Image/paper size (each): 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches (50 x 70 cm)
Edition of 60
Signed lower right (bottom right sheet); titled lower center (bottom center sheet); numbered lower left (bottom left sheet)
(Inventory #29298)

Prologo
1993
Collage, pencil, and die-cut lithograph on paper

Image/paper size: 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches (50 x 70 cm)
Edition of 150, AP
Signed lower right and numbered lower left in graphite
(Inventory #30648)

Carte Noire
1999-
2000
Lithograph, graphite and collage on paper in nine parts

Overall arrangement size (approximately): 59 x 82 3/4 inches (150 x 210 cm)
Image/paper size (each): 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches (50 x 70 cm)
Edition of 30
Signed and numbered in graphite on bottom center sheet. Title is printed in black ink on bottom center sheet around signature and edition information
(Inventory #29733)

Immacolata Concezione. Senza titolo / Senza autore
2008
Die-cut lithograph and collage on paper

19 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (50 x 35 cm)
Edition of 100
Signed and numbered recto in graphite
(Inventory #35487)

L’offerta musicale
2008
Lithograph and collage on paper

Image/paper size: 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches (50 x 70 cm)
Edition of 100
Signed and numbered bottom center in graphite
(Inventory #30646)

Santa Croce 2073
2010
Lithograph on paper

Image/paper size: 13 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (35 x 50 cm)
Edition of 100, AP
Signed and numbered lower center in graphite
(Inventory #30651)

Additional Information

Giulio Paolini was born on November 5, 1940 in Genoa. Throughout his career, Giulio Paolini has been fixated on the act of seeing as well as the relationship between the seer and the seen. Emerging in the context of the Italian Arte Povera artists of the 1960s, he shared with his cohorts a profound mistrust of the commodity status assigned to traditional media such as painting. Working in a historical moment that saw the ascendancy of painting in the 1960s in the form of American Abstract Expressionism and the European Art Informel, Paolini took an iconoclastic position, suggesting that the medium was a “question without an answer.” He chose instead to embark on a conceptual exploration of the parameters of painting’s status within our culture as well as its physical structure, or what he has called “the space of painting.” 1 His Delfo (Delphi) (1965) is a perfect example of the artist’s early structural investigations into the nature of painting and its relationship to seeing. Taking its title from the oracle of Delphi, a “seer’ in Greek antiquity who dispensed prophecies, the image is a photographic self-portrait of the artist wearing dark glasses and confronting the viewer from behind the wooden support bars of an unstretched painting. After he transferred this image to a piece of canvas through a photographic process, Delfo became a hybrid object that is both a photograph and a painting, yet at the same time is neither. It is paradoxically a work that refuses both the status and the act of painting while self-reflexively emphasizing the philosophical implications of the hidden physical support structure of that medium. In a very real sense then, Paolini has made painting the content of this work without ever putting brush to canvas.

If Delfo asks us to consider the implications of what lies physically beneath a painting’s surface, it also brings into play a discussion of seeing and being seen. Is the artist himself the seer suggested by its title? Though he looks out at the viewer from behind the surface of a painting, neither artist nor spectator can fully meet the other’s gaze, as their views are blocked by the conceit of the reproduced stretcher bars. This frustrating short-circuiting of the relational act of seeing and being seen raises issues regarding vision as well as painting. The question that is begged is how do we see the work of art, but more importantly, how does that work of art see us? This play of vision foreshadows future works by Paolini such as Mimesi (Mimesis) (1976-1988), a sculpture consisting of a pair of identical plaster copies of Praxiteles Hermes that are turned to face each other, their eyes caught in a Narcissistic feedback loop of seeing and being seen. Both works invoke the legacy of art history’s fascination with vision and looking that stretches back at least to Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656), a painting that is as much about the possibilities of making a picture as it is about the relationship between the seer and the seen. In light of this, Paolini’s work looks toward the conceptual future of art-making as much as it does to its past.

Quotes in this paragraph are from Paolini, conversation with Francesco Bonami, Richard Flood, and Kathy Halbreich in the artist’s studio in Turin, Italy, September 27, 1997 (transcript, Walker Art Center Archives).

Fogle, Douglas. Giulio Paolini. In Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections, edited by Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2005.
© 2005 Walker Art Center

International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) Fair Fall 2021 Online Edition

October 15, 2021
- October 31, 2021

Remake (Online Only)

May 13, 2021
- June 3, 2021

Featuring works by Sarah Charlesworth, Giulio Paolini, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Shellburne Thurber

Giulio Paolini: 1986-2010

September 21, 2019
- November 2, 2019

Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), The Art Show 2018

February 27, 2018
- March 4, 2018

Overlays

January 6, 2018
- February 10, 2018

Featuring works by Sol LeWitt, Giulio Paolini, and Richard Smith

Times/Changes

January 28, 2017
- March 11, 2017

Featuring works by Giulio Paolini, Liliana Porter, and Paolo Ventura