Giulio Paolini 52-54 Bell Street Preview Tuesday 25 November, 6 - 8 pm 26 November - 17 January, 2009
Lisson Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of Italian artist Giulio Paolini. Often linked to the Arte Povera movement, Paolini is best known for a more strictly conceptual practice. The exhibition will present a new body of mixed media work, which investigates the figure of the author and its role in the creation of the work of art. For Paolini, the idea of the work is an "autonomous entity" and the picture plane is a surface that is a depository of every possible projection of an image. Therefore, the author steps aside, he is "mute, absent, the voice is the voice of the work: but the work of art gives voice neither to the world nor the subject; it simply gives form to itself."
The core of the exhibition at Lisson Gallery will be a multi-part sculptural work, Immaculate Conception: Without Title/Without Author, 2008, which alludes to the "absence of contact between the creator and (his) work, the abstention of the one referred to the pre-existence of the other" (Giulio Paolini, 2008). Also on show will be four large mixed media works and a series of print works.
Since the outset of his career in the 1960s, Paolini's work has centred on the figure of the artist as an operator of language, and accomplice of the viewer through strategies of citation, duplication and fragmentation. Most recently, Paolini's incessant investigation of the definition and purpose of the work has been concerned with the act of exhibiting, which he sees as the fundamental moment of encountering the work.
Giulio Paolini was born in 1940 and lives and works in Turin. He has exhibited extensively internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Zurich, Westf�lisches Landesmuseum, M�nster, and GAMec, Bergamo (2005) and MART, Trento e Rovereto (2004). Paolini's work has also been exhibited internationally as part of group exhibitions, including Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Tate Modern, London (2000); Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2003) and Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2002).
His work is held in collections worldwide including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Museo d�arte contemporanea Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Tate Collection, London.
