Martin Heidegger, Glenn Gould, Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein: characters that Francesco Arena has chosen or rediscovered in multiple contexts over the time recur in this book. Ranging from philosophy, to music, to visual arts, they embrace the whole world of knowledge.
This first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri aims to highlight the themes and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects at GAMeC, Bergamo; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Swiss Institute, New York; Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; and the National Gallery, London.
The book highlights the main characteristics of the collective trauma that gave rise to Rachel Whiteread’s project for GAMeC. The psychoanalysts Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis map out a composite picture, starting from the sense of vulnerability and collective loss associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This book, with follows the eponymous exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, is constructed as a story, with a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue: an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative.
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. It features a commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
What if clay is the future and the future is clay? Curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos brought together a group of artists to think and create through this old, maleable and fascinating matter. The result was materialized in an exhibition and book format entitled Feet of Clay.
The Empty Room Christian Frosi and Other Escapes from the Art Scene
Edited by Nicola Ricciardi
Design by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2022, English / Italian, softcover, 240 pages, 17 x 24 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-28-7
Christian Frosi (Milan, 1973) was long considered one of the most inspiring and promising Italian artists debuting in the early 2000s. That is until just over ten years into his career, when he decided to make himself unreachable and remove himself from art history, its customs and figures.
This choice brings him abstractly close to Marcel Duchamp, Agnes Martin, Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske and the many other artists before him who decided of their own volition to stop producing art and participating in the art world (sometimes for a few years, sometimes forever). This publication speaks of all of them, with a twofold purpose: on one hand to write the history of Christian Frosi’s works and exhibitions — for the first time in an organized and timely manner — and on the other, to relativize the pages left blank through the stories of other “dropout artists,” each with their own particular destiny yet united by a common desire to escape.
The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition La Stanza Vuota [The Empty Room], curated by Nicola Riccardi and staged at GAMeC in Bergamo. This first-ever retrospective of Christian Frosi’s oeuvre featured more than thirty works embodying precariousness, transience and evanescence — constant elements in his enigmatic, transitory output.