Born on November 5, 1940, in Genoa, Giulio Paolini lives in Turin. Since his first participation in a group show in 1961 and his first solo exhibition in 1964, he has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Major retrospectives have been held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1980), Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne (1984), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart (1986), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (1988), Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz (1998) and Fondazione Prada, Milan (2003). Recent anthological exhibitions include those at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014), Fondazione Carriero, Milan (2018), and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin (2020). The artist has also participated in several Arte Povera exhibitions and has been invited several times to the Kassel Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992) and the Venice Biennale (1970, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2013).
From the beginning, Paolini has accompanied his artistic research with reflections collected in books he edited himself: from Idem, with an introduction by Italo Calvino (Einaudi, Turin 1975), to Quattro passi. Nel museo senza muse (Einaudi, Turin 2006) and L’autore che credeva di esistere (Johan & Levi, Milan 2012). He has also made sets and costumes for theatrical productions, among which are projects conceived with Carlo Quartucci in the 1980s and the sets for two operas by Richard Wagner directed by Federico Tiezzi (2005, 2007).
Since the early 1960s, Giulio Paolini has oriented his poetics toward a conceptual dimension, drawing attention to the constituent elements of a painting, the space of representation, the relationship between the work and the viewer, as well as the figure of the author. Over time, his investigations around the work of art have led him to include the act of exhibition and the artist’s studio as domains deputed to the becoming of a work. Paolini’s frame of reference is the classical tradition, inspired by Beauty and the metaphysical dimension of art, unrelated to the transformations of the world and lived life. Beginning with the first painting made in 1960, Disegno geometrico, Paolini’s works have “nothing to declare”: they do not want to communicate anything, to merely evoke the premises of their manifestation. They enact the waiting for an image, which evades all attempts at fixation to remain suspended in the potential dimension. The artist decides to abandon the proactive role: instead of an actor on stage, he prefers to remain anonymous and assume the guise of a spectator, sitting in the audience waiting for the performance to begin. Thus, frequent are silent stand-ins, either observing a painting or holding an image element in front of them (back figures, valets, masters of ceremony). In other cases, it is the traces of the eclipsed author-objects, clothing, shoes-that testify to his exile from the field of action.
The place par excellence designated for the appearance of a work is the artist’s studio. Hence the recurring presence of easels, frames, sheets, canvases, working tools, a table in the center of a room or an actual view of Paolini’s studio. From the emblematic work entitled Vedo (la decifrazione del mio campo visivo) 1969, to the motifs of the eye and the visual cone developed in the late 1970s, to the complex devices deployed in subsequent decades, the gaze occupies a privileged role in Paolini’s work. True visual devices, Paolini’s works take the form of diaphragms between incompatible dimensions: like mirrors or filters that interrogate the interval between reality and fiction, intelligibility and imagination. From the illusions of representation to the disillusionment of vision, it is a short step. Indeed, Paolini’s language is characterized by the use of laceration, shattering, explosion and dispersion as expedients to suggest an unbridgeable distance from an ideal model. The Cartesian geometry that defines many of his works eventually implodes into itself, in a kaleidoscopic labyrinth of specular splittings and multiplications.
Although oriented toward resetting and suspension, Paolini’s work never renounces the image; indeed, it avowedly draws on a vast iconographic repertoire. Details of works of art, star charts, planets, skies, sunsets, ancient architecture, female figures, portraits, and scripture alternate with symbolic motifs such as the swan, gold, and sphere. Photographic or photostatic reproductions, casts, copies and quotations dot the works with artistic, literary, philosophical and mythological references to suggest a theater of evocations, a nursery of images in which echoes and reflections of all times and places resonate. Borges, Roussel, Pirandello, Robbe-Grillet, Calvin, Euclid, Parmenides, Lucretius, Plotinus, Averroes, Praxiteles, Phidias, Lotto, Poussin, Velázquez, Chardin, Watteau, Robert, Canova, Ingres, de Chirico, Echo, Narcissus, Psyche, Venus, Mnemosyne, Orpheus, Icarus, Sisyphus, Selinunte, Ebla, Kythera, Hierapolis, Ithaca…
There are several awards that the artist has won over the course of a long and satisfying career: from the Golden Telecamera Award for the television set design of Carlo Quartucci’s Don Quixote (1971), to the Imperial Award for Painting (2022), passing through the Honorable Mention at the XII Bienal de São Paolo (1973), the Lucio Fontana Award (1975), the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1995) and the Dance & Dance Award for the sets and costumes of Davide Bombana’s ballet Teorema (2000).
Finally, Paolini’s works can be found in renowned public and private collections, both national and international. Among the many, they include: the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate in London, La Collezione Prada and the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Madre – Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris and the Pinault Collection (Bourse de Commerce, Paris and Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice), the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and MAXXI in Rome and MART in Rovereto.