Giulio Paolini

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. This 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.

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.

The multi-part sculptural work, Immaculate Conception: Without Title/Without Author, 2008, will be the conceptual core of the exhibition: the work 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). The main gallery space will be dedicated to a new series of installations, composed of wall drawings, Plexiglas, picture frames and paper elements. Chamber Apocalypse, 2008, depicts the author within a schematic architectural space: the figure seen from behind is holding a blank sheet of paper. After All, 2008 centres around a fragment of drawing that depicts the author in the act of observing the work itself. Paolini views the work as an autonomous entity, and the picture plane as a surface that is a depository of every possible projection of an image. The artist therefore 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 works will be complemented in the upstairs gallery by a series of twenty-eight original collage studies for the work Immaculate Conception.