Johan & Levi: Illustrati

Conceived by Giulio Paolini, one of the best-known and most acclaimed conceptual artists, this book takes stock in a certain sense of a life lived in the art world both as a leading participant and as an observer of the key stages in its evolution over the last forty years. It opens with a text in which the artist uses words to illustrate his philosophical and artistic stance. Short pieces written by figures on the art scene close to the artist then introduce the nine thematic sections into which the nearly 150 collages created specifically for this project are divided. In keeping with Giulio Paolini’s international prominence, the final section presents English translations of all the texts.

The book offers a comprehensive view of Nanda Vigo’s artistic production, from the sixties up to her last artworks in 2005. An exhaustive critical essay, edited by Dominique Stella, presents Nanda Vigo’s career, emphasizing her interdisciplinary approach rather than the traditional and restrictive classification of the artist as architect and designer. The book is divided into three sections: art, architecture and design, each introduced by unpublished texts by Tommaso Trini, I.J. Schoonhoven, Ettore Sottsass and Lucio Fontana, which highlight her talent in combining such different artistic expressions. Nanda Vigo was born in Milan and has studied Architecture in Losanna. After some professional experience in the United States she came back to Milan to work with Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Giò Ponti. She joined actively major European movements of artistic experimentation such as Gruppo Zero, Aktuel and Licht und Bewegung, cultivating an interdisciplinary link between architecture, art, design and the environment. She now lives and works in Italy and Africa.

"Each became absorbed in their own artistic universe, in ways that gradually acquired consistency and weight over the years. Art animated their lives, an inexorable imperative. Painting was the sole, intimate necessity for both, perhaps the only real secret of their indissoluble bond."

Re-programmed Art: An Open Manifesto is an action research project that explored the impact of methods and approaches linked to open source hardware and software on the field of art. The aim was to produce a number of physical and technological artefacts whose information and implementation specifications are publicly released under free licenses.The group of digital artists and designers involved in the project had the task of re-programming a number of works by Gruppo T, the pioneering group at the forefront of the Italian art movement known as Arte Programmata. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, these artists developed a ground-breaking vision of art as reproducible, participatory and interactive, and created prototypes based on the use of algorithms and technology which were designed to be reproduced as series of constantly changing artefacts. The concept of 're-programming' is about more than just reconstructing the original works, understanding what they were made of and how they were made, and the algorithms used to incorporate an element of chance. It means bringing them to life again, reworked using new materials and technology. Pieces by Gruppo T were thus transformed into new, open artworks that can be reproduced, expanded on and completed by other users: a vibrant tribute to an original, innovative movement that occupied the no man's land between art and design.

Art is always contemporary. From this principle and the renewed collaboration between the Pinacoteca and the Accademia di Belle Arti springs the exhibition Contemporary Brera. Fabro Garutti Kounellis Paolini, a tribute to four great artists whose names are variously associated with Brera. The exhibition promotes the active presence of Contemporary Art in a historic museum such as the Pinacoteca, in keeping with the well-established role of the Palazzo di Brera as a laboratory for innovation. At the same time, it updates the revolutionary message of Processo per il museo, organized by Franco Russoli in the short-lived 1970s season of his career, encouraging visitors to experience the palace as a dynamic space in which the arts undergo a constant rebirth. On display are Luciano Fabro’s Groma per Spinoza, Io (L’Uovo) and Modo di mettere le lenzuola, and new installations have been especially designed by Alberto Garutti, Jannis Kounellis and Giulio Paolini for the rooms of the Pinacoteca, from the spacious Napoleonic halls to the chapel of St. Joseph – where they stand in direct and ‘simultaneous’ contact with the masterpieces by Raffaello, Bernardino Luini and Bramantino. This juxtaposition of works from different periods confirms and renews the ultimate significance of exhibiting art, as well as the role that the Palazzo di Brera is seeking to reclaim: that of a venue for observation, discovery and personal, inner research, always open to the contemporary.

A single place with three projects: Brera Palace tells its story, revealing its soul in all its glory through three projects. For the first time, with ‘Accademia aperta,’ students and professors open the doors to the classrooms of the Academy’s ten schools, offering visitors the unique possibility to observe the daily activities of its studios and workshops up close, while ‘Ai confini del quadro. Brera anni sessanta-settanta’ (Beyond the Frame: Brera in the 60s and 70s) puts the spotlight on historical figures of that unique era who brought international fame to Brera and its district, where “art-making” was evolving through the constant interchange both inside and out of the palace walls. ‘Bagnoli, Curran, Lim, Pistoletto, Richter. Installazioni nel Palazzo di Brera’ brings visitors into the world of contemporary art as the entire building thanks to its natural, centuries-old tradition of opening its historical spaces –  the Academy of Fine Arts, Braidense National Library, Botanical Garden, Astronomical Observatory and Art Gallery – fills with dynamism, to dialogue and interact with the new in search of unexpected parallels and convergences. Thus, past, present and future are the trajectories along which the original calling of this “encyclopaedic palace” manages to constantly express and revitalize itself. In the end, Brera puts its patrimony in touch with the contemporary world, activating a process that increases its value and engages the legends of yesterday and the talents of today and tomorrow.   Cover Photo: Cosmo Laera

Marco Petrus's work is a dizzying chromatic and compositional swirl soon transmuted into a journey through the buildings of countless cities, to which the trained eye will be able to assign names and precise paternity from one painting to the next. An opportunity for recognition but also surprise, for an unusual view of something known that the artist's mimetic ability is able to recreate on canvas. A walk through Helsinki, Milan, Marseilles and Naples but above all through the nuances and geometrics of an authentic ideal atlas of 20th-century and contemporary architecture.

I think that the solution to the possible conflict between Busci as architect and as painter lies in this original dialectic, a kind of obstacle course: the redemption, sublimation and evanescence of the pictorial sign as against the harshness of reality.The delicate strokes of a deft calligrapher delineating dark gleams, nocturnal lights, hypnotic monochrome landscapes of obscure foreboding. A dark vision of the urban drama of the world. A sort of de Pisis in reverse, where the gracefully choreographic movements of the entranced artist's brush give way to scenarios of metropolitan apocalypse with monochrome lyrical and theatrical overtones.

Island: the word conjures up isolated places we nonetheless seek to reach, touching the realm of the real and the imaginary, the concrete and the abstract. It inspires a myriad of artistic, cultural, linguistic, philosophical and musical reflections, a flow of sensations and stimuli that spring and spread from an idea and a place. Remo Salvadori is our guide to this infinite world, drawing on a project he carried out on Isola Comacina, an island that the King of Belgium gifted to Italy in 1920, and which was then entrusted to the Brera Academy to create a place for artistic and cultural events. The Academy’s project for developing Isola Comacina was guided by the atmospheric photographs of the island taken by Paola di Bello. Remo Salvadori, artist and lecturer, worked for two consecutive years with Academy students on the concept of island, as a destination and meeting place, gathering the works of 80 young artists. He then set about involving more than 50 writers, asking them to contribute a piece of writing about the idea of island. The result is a unique publication that alternates text and images, combining an educational programme with artistic projects, and bringing together poetry and conceptual developments, reflections and visual pleasure. The contributors include Alfredo Albiani, Flavio Ambrosini, Stefano Andi, Haim Baharier, Susanna Janina Baumgartner, Marco Biraghi, Sofia Boffardi, Roberto Borghi, Enric Bou, Giovanni Bruno e Francesca Varalli, Angelo Capasso, Letizia Cariello, Alessandro Carrera, Laura Cherubini, Antonella Commellato, Francesco Correggia, Bettina Della Casa, Paola Di Bello, Alessandro Di Pietro, Roberto Favaro, Rachele Ferrario, Massimo Venturi Ferriolo, Giuliano Fuortes, Romano Gasparotti, Daniele Geminiani, Giovanni Iovane, Gérard-Georges Lemarie, Sandro Levi, Elisabetta Longari, Giorgio Magni, Marco Magni, Olivia Mair Cacciari, Daniele Nani, Giovanni Ozzola, Loredana Parmesani, Gianluca Poldi, Isabella Puliafito, Elena Quarestani, Roberto Rossi Roberti, Carla Sanguineti, Monica Scaccabarozzi, Cesare Serratto, Tetsuro Shimizu, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Ida Terracciano, Roberto Tresoldi, Francesca Valli and Luca Vitone.

The 'analytical line' that emerged in artistic debate in the sixties led to a significant change in the role of photography, the consequences of which are still felt today. In those pivotal years, photography was emancipated from technical virtuosity for its own sake, and opened up to new conceptual practices. Finally legitimsed as art, it became the object of intense theoretical and linguistic analysis. Marinella Paderni starts out from this historical premise to document the work of artists who, from the mid nineties to the present, have metaphorically taken up the legacies of that conceptual season, forging continuity between the avant-garde movements of that period and today's currents in photography. Her analysis examines theoretical debates on the 'reinvention of the medium' and outlines the last two generations of contemporary Italian photography: a scenario that bears witness to the emergence of original visual practices and a multifaceted reflection on photographic language in the era of the dematerialisation of reality.

In an age where ideologies and schools of thought have lost the capacity to forge strong cultural models, where national identities are gradually dissolving into a global context, and the distinctive characteristics of individual aesthetic languages faded out some time ago in favour of contamination, it is legitimate to ask whether we can still consider the contemporary period in terms of one single medium - in this case sculpture - within the boundaries of a specific national context. With these questions in mind, Alessandra Galasso explores the roots of contemporary sculpture in its many facets and declinations, traces its origines and presents the most recent work of the Italian artists engaged in this expressive genre. Her analysis commences from a historical perspective, embracing the entire sculpture tradition of the 20th century, and the radical changes that characterised it, then looks to the italian art panorama of the last decade, identifying original visual strategies and new interpretations of our complex reality. The thirty artists presented in Laboratorio italia - young italian sculptors, all share the awareness of combining old identities with new multicultural contexts, the practice of recovering traditional aesthetic canons with the desire to reinvent them from a new angle, and new materials. All the artists blend experimentation and tradition in their own ways, and combine their own personal stories with the Zeitgeist.

This volume is a double portrait of painters Zoran Mušič and Ida Barbarigo, depicting them from their first meeting in Trieste in spring 1944 until Mušič’s death in 2005. He was a Slovenian, born on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a family of vintners, in a town whose name means a small hill. In 1944 he was over 30 and had already been to Venice and met Ida’s father, the painter Guido Cadorin (famous for the panels in the “Room of Pure Dreams” at D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale) by whom he was immediately fascinated. Ida was 20, she had always painted, and was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. She was descended from the Cadorin, originally from Cadore, who owned one of the oldest sculpture workshops in Venice. Zoran’s exhibition in Trieste left her unimpressed and she was not at all attracted to the reserved young artist with kind eyes. But their lives, whose most significant moments are described on these pages, were destined to be forever intertwined: from their first meeting in Trieste to Mušič’s deportation to Dachau; from his return to Venice in a state of exhaustion, to his courting and then marrying Ida in 1949; from the early years of married life in Venice, a crossroads for many artists – Arturo Martini, Virgilio Guidi, de Chirico, De Pisis, Campigli – to the Paris period and the friendships, acquaintances, and relations with the Galerie de France.   Two lives devoted to painting and narrated in this book through a hundred unpublished photographs from the period.