For Gianfranco Baruchello's 100th birthday, the Baruchello Foundation presents a series of events

To celebrate the 100th birthday of Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 - Rome, 2023), the Baruchello Foundation in Rome, chaired by curator Carla Subrizi, is promoting a series of initiatives starting in the coming fall months. From October 25, 2024 to March 2025 in Paris, the Centre Pompidou presents the exhibition tentatively titled Doux comme saveur curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Jonathan Poutier. The exhibition hosts the unabridged edition of Doux comme saveur (Beginning with dessert), a film made up of some 24 hours of interviews conducted by Baruchello with both workers and pastry chefs, as well as prominent cultural figures including philosophers, writers, and psychoanalysts, including Noëlle Châtelet, David Cooper, Félix Guattari, Alain Jouffroy, Pierre Klossowski, Gilbert Lascault, and Jean-François Lyotard. The film is the result of a project conceived in 1978 by Baruchello during the years of the longtime action Agricola Cornelia S.p.A. (1973-1981). The focal point of the artist’s 1970s and 1980s project is the sweet taste and how it can be the starting point of so many emotions, memories and reflections until we come to think of animal death, the putrefaction of flesh, as the results of war, power and the exploitation of nature.

The program continues with the November 2024 event: a month that will see the publication of the volume Baruchello. Certain Ideas, edited by Carla Subrizi (Electa editore): a monograph that reconstructs the artist’s complete oeuvre including painting, drawing, objects and his installations. In November and December 2024, the Baruchello Foundation is also organizing Baruchello. The Garden as a joint agent. a title taken from a Baruchello film presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2011, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. This is a workshop with students, young curators and artists that will go over with the participants, themes inherent in Baruchello’s reflections on themes of nature, up to the most recent experiments in the world of plants. The Foundation, which has decided to inaugurate a series of republications of books by the writer that are no longer available, continues the program with three exhibitions dedicated to the artist, the last of which will be by artist Fritz Haeg.

On January 23 and 24, 2025, the International Study Conference Il Possibile: Instructions for Use. Studies on the work of Gianfranco Baruchello that will involve scholars, curators, Italian and international museum directors. The conference aims to trace the fundamental aspects of his work in the Italian and international art-historical context in order to bring out the characters that make the artist’s work unique and the complexity of his investigation. The organizing committee consists of Roberto Antonelli, Lina Bolzoni, Piero Boitani, Carla Subrizi, Claudio Zambianchi, and Alessandro Zuccari. Edited by Carla Subrizi. Finally, the publication of a book tracing Baruchello’s last drawings is planned for 2025, edited by Andrea Bellini and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with texts by the curators and Carla Subrizi (graphic design by Edoardo Visalli). The edition was sponsored by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. The celebrations for the centenary of the artist’s birth will conclude in 2025-2026 with the publication of the Catalogue raisonné on which the Foundation has been working for more than 10 years. The catalog, edited by Carla Subrizi, will include introductory texts by Carlos Basualdo and Francesco Tedeschi.

Notes on the artist

Gianfranco Baruchello (Leghorn, Italy, 1924 - Rome, 2023) was an artist, writer and intellectual who, since the early 1960s, has used a variety of media including painting, the camera, photography, writing, performance, installation and, as he himself had defined it, “activity.” Inventor of fictitious societies, different painting techniques such as painting on multiple layers of Plexiglas, experimenter between art and agriculture, maker of films from pre-existing materials, Baruchello forged relationships with artists of his generation but also with poets, philosophers, writers such as Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Manganelli and friendships such as those with John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Calvin Tomkins. Baruchello, who was also active in the 1960s on the political scene, also forged relationships with exponents of French culture and literature, including those with Alain Jouffroy, Gilbert Lascault, and Jean-François Lyotard. An ecologist, so much so that in the 1980s and 1990s he devoted attention to the relationship with Nature by creating works such as The Garden (1985, in progress), The Forest (1992, in progress), up to Beatrix (2020, in progress), turning a gaze to the individual’s connection with the environment. In 1998 he established with Carla Subrizi a Foundation for Contemporary Art in order to safeguard and continue to promote research on his work, preserve archives and collect a substantial nucleus of works.

For Gianfranco Baruchello's 100th birthday, the Baruchello Foundation presents a series of events

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