Giulio Paolini. Quando è il presente?
Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy
From 18 March to 7 September 2022
Curated by Bettina Della Casa and Sergio Risaliti
Giulio Paolini is the protagonist of an unpublished exhibition project, which brings together works of his most recent production in dialogue with the Renaissance architecture of the rooms on the ground floor of the Museo Novecento. The title of the exhibition, When is the present?, is taken from a letter written in 1922 by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas Salomè and constitutes the starting point from which Giulio Paolini traces his own meditation about time and our inability to grasp it, combining questions about the role of art and the figure of the artist with those about existence and its flow. The works on display, at the center of a path conceived by the artist himself, interact with the Renaissance architecture of the rooms on the ground floor of the Museo Novecento, inviting us to take a journey into his latest reflections on the meaning of artistic creation and on the its multiple implications. As the artist has often declared his appreciation for Beato Angelico, in addition to the show Giulio Paolini has also realized a collage on an easel inspired by the fresco "Noli me tangere" preserved in the Convent of San Marco and that will be exhibited in front of the painting made by the Dominican friar.
In photo: Giulio Paolini, L’arte di non esserci, 2018 – 2019. Pencil and collage on paper in plexiglas cases, cm 206 x 220.
Private collection © Giulio Paolini. Photo Luca Vianello. Courtesy Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Turin