Giulio Paolini was born in 1940 in Genoa. In 1952, he relocated to Turin and has lived for some years now in Paris as well.

In the year 1964, he already had his first solo exhibition in Rome. And then 1973 marked the beginning of the artist’s work with the Annemarie Verna Gallery. This first solo exhibition in Switzerland was also one of the first exhibitions of the artist’s works outside Italy.

’Reportage’ is the name of the installation currently on view. It is the eighth solo presentation of the artist to take place in the gallery. Over the years, his works have filled numerous exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide, such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Kunstmuseum Lucerne and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 1998 the Neue Galerie of the Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, showed an extensive retrospective, which was adapted for a 1999 showing in the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin.

Current art historiography views Paolini as one of the most important exponents of the ‘Arte Povera,’ a label that hardly does justice, however, to his intelligent and differentiated working method.

His self-reflexive practice of art, which has supplied his work for already over forty years now, is like a continuing conversation about art.

In the course of this conversation, descriptions and transcriptions of great beauty and lightness arise. These loose yet precise creations, which often only hint and always leave room for mystery, produce aesthetic intrinsic value as well as added value, so to speak. Indeed, a certain something is always discussed in the works, a subject’s many facets are considered and interpreted. But what communicates and makes an impression is the fascination of these dialogues through which the figure of the artist increasingly emerges – as a point of departure and as a result, as a construction, reflected again in the construction of the perspective, of the fictive three-dimensionality.

The artist is, then, a fictive figure that assumes real form in the work and remains living until he has succeeded in carrying on the dialogue, which is like a monologue with echo.

He creates a place for himself in art and in art history, in a coordinate system that provides the foundation and framework for his work. He opens up the stage where he makes his appearance to the beholder, who is invited to participate as a co-actor.

The work ‘Reportage’ is a ‘self-portrait’ of the artist, as his own beholder. It makes use of the two large gallery spaces facing each other. In the four book objects ‘Pagine,’ the artist unfolds a description of the description of art.