Photo-certificate of authenticity by the artist, 30 September 2021.

Born in Genoa, Italy in November 1940, artist Giulio Paolini currently lives and works in Turin. Since his first participation in a group exhibition in 1961 and the inauguration of his first solo show in 1964, he has held countless exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide. Over the course of his career, Giulio Paolini became a prominent figure within the Arte Povera movement and an important representative for the development of conceptual art as an art form in the 1960s. Initially trained as a graphic designer, Paolini would eventually go on to work with sculpture, painting, and later, photography and collage. Within this multi-faceted artistic practice, the artist has consistently acted as mediator between viewer and work on view. Through the introduction of formal elements such as fragmentation, citation and duplication, Paolini stages elaborate investigations of the image and its representation. His installations often follow distinctive compositional forms, ranging from additive elements that order, juxtapose or repeat, to dynamics radiating from a central point such as explosions, and lastly to integrative arrangements that utilise the concentration, or superimposition of elements. Drawing from a vast repertoire of references his practice became increasingly more concerned with the exploration of the artistic canon, reproducing details from artists such as Diego Velázquez. Through formal acts of simultaneous deformation and exploration of form, medium and subject, Paolini questions the very understanding of the artistic canon. As part of his recent body of work, Paolini has focused on the exhibition as a subject, exploring the act of a viewer’s first encounter with a work of art within the physical space.

“Aula di disegno” (2005) is an extraordinary example of Paolini’s contemporary reflections of spatial concepts and drawing as a primary medium that has shaped and informed art theory and its history. The four canvasses are aligned perfectly, creating the illusion of a unified surface. Presenting an intricate graphite spatial drawing that evokes the one-point perspective of a room containing multiple surfaces, its composition is interrupted in the centre of the work through the addition of the cut-out imagery of an opened book. Inscribed and faintly visible on the surface of the small collage is the line “18.11.2005 Aula di disegno”. Translated to “drawing room”, the title of the refers to the physical space in which drawing is taught academically. It may refer to a series of site-specific works commissioned for the “GAMeC” museum in Bergamo when Paolini was invited for a solo exhibition dedicated to his work in 2006. Each exhibition room at the time was referred to as “Aula”, “classroom”. Contextualising the space as a place for the transmission of knowledge and above all for the study of traditional artistic techniques, the third room was referred to as “Aula di disegno”. The present work thus becomes a tribute, celebrating the act of drawing as the catalyst for representation, repetition and the making of art theory.