The act of exhibiting according to Giulio Paolini on display at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna

From Sept. 24, 2024 to Jan. 4, 2025, Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna presents the seventh solo exhibition of Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940) entitled GIULIO PAOLINI Un posto vuoto. The space hosts four new works and some works on paper that invite the viewer to explore their vision through the diagonals of the environment. The theme of the exhibition is the investigation of the act of exhibiting itself. In the center of the room is positioned Ultimo modello, a set of Plexiglas structures featuring fragments of photographic reproductions-a “construction site” anticipating a work in the making. Placed around the four sides of Ultimo modello is L’Efebo, consisting of four plaster casts of the bust of Ephebus placed on white bases.

In Vertigo, the plaster cast of Antonio Canova ’s Ebe made in 1796 is associated with a cloth that falls to the ground, as if to extend the presence of the robe that adorns the female figure. The fabric presents a daytime sky composed of clouds, at which a genesa crystal and an amethyst stone are laid, objects that carry a timeless spirituality. At the opposite end of the diagonal on which Vertigo is placed is Ecstasy of Saint Sebastian. Lorenzo Costa ’s reproduction of Saint Sebastian (1490-95) is inscribed by a circular gilded frame and placed in a staggered manner on the white passe-partout. The whole is pierced in the center by a black pencil: for the artist it is the instrument of “martyrdom” that causes him to renew his attempt to establish ecstatic contact with an absolute dimension. The primary theme of the exhibition is theinvestigation of the act of exhibiting itself: a process that is activated with the figures of antiquity, protagonists and witnesses of the work’s completion in an ineffable and absolute dimension. The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Marina Dacci.

“Canova’s Hebe flees and evades our gaze: even the sky above her seems to envelop her body and give rise to an imminent and dizzying disappearance,” Giulio Paolini announces. “For some time now I have had a preference for themes and exhibition opportunities in Italy. The progressive dilation of cultural borders, certainly useful for the mutual acquaintance of different experiences is, however, a limitation to the authentic correspondence of a work with its own history. As if the domestic walls, the intimacy of one’s own studio, persisted in comparison with the too familiar and homologated latitudes of our planet. Italian art then? Yes, though free to frequent infinite trajectories, everywhere and forever in Time and History. Here then are echoes and memories of authors, distant relatives of this new (or ancient) season of mine. A petit-tour in a room: a less vast but more precious world. Individual, bodily beauty, embodied by the male figure of Ephebus, is caught in contemplation of the symbolic space evoked by Ultimo modello in an unmitigated confrontation between one truth and another.”

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The act of exhibiting according to Giulio Paolini on display at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna

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