NEWS

Curated by Paolo Emilio Antognoli
From 24.10 to 04.12.2015

at Villa Romana
Via Senese 68, 50124 Florence, Italy

Opening: Saturday, October 24 at 7 pm.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 2 to 6 pm and on appointment

The square, semi-transparent Kleenex modules, stuck onto humble parcel paper, form orderly, regular, mass-produced, rhythmic, progressive isometric compositions in which the colours, in elegant variations, are the same as the different materials he employed. On occasion he also used gold, inspired by his trips to the East – prevalently Nepal and northern India. The work with Kleenex tissues ended between 1979 and 1980, with the development of a new phase in his work, heralded by mythological and archetypal references to the myth of Asterion, Ariadne (weaver of shadows) and the Labyrinth. Paper is a common element linking Bartolini’s works to his artist’s books and to the editions that accompanied all his solo shows as integral parts of the exhibition process. The epitextual appendix of the book, as a part, establishes in fact an organic relationship with the whole, that is, the exhibition, understood metaphorically as one kind of macrotext.

The Villa Romana exhibition is divided into two parts. On display in the Salone will be a large Kleenex piece from the middle of the decade, and the work entitled Ouroboros 1977, which allusively references his experiences in the East. In the centre of the exhibition path is Moschea della Perla an artpiece produced in 1977 and exhibited one year later at the Paul Maenz gallery in Cologne. The second part, arranged in the Sala Giardino, will feature the complete collection of Bartolini’s artist’s books, and works forming part of Annotazione e definizione di un feticcio exhibited by Schema Gallery in Florence in 1978.

Two books, both published by Archive Books of Berlin, will also be presented on the occasion of the show. The first, edited by Paolo Emilio Antognoli, is Firenze 1977, Luciano Bartolini, Michael Buthe, Klaus vom Bruch, Martin Kippenberger, Marcel Odenbach, Anna Oppermann, Ulrike Rosenbach &tc. Materiali su Artisti Italiani e Tedeschi a Firenze e Villa Romana attorno al 1977 (1976-78).
The second, prepared by the Archivio Luciano Bartolini, is entitled Luciano Bartolini. Pensando all’Oriente 1973 - 1979. Materiali d’Archivio.