User:Tomatolover22/Evaluate an Article

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Giulio Paolini

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I chose this article because I appreciate this artist's art and his artistic direction and felt that his Wikipedia page was barren compared to the possible sources that could be used to further expand on Giulio Paolini's work.

Evaluate the article
The Wikipedia entry for Giulio Paolini talks about varying aspects of his identity as a person and as an artist. He is an Italian artist by origin, the entry doesn’t elaborate much on his early life and his family but it does state that he was born in Genoa, was raised in Bergamo, and later moved with his family to Turin where he ended up settling down and calling his home. Through the entry his work was addressed and broken down into the main themes that he tackled with his art, some of these include: self citation towards the 70’s with a lot of his work associated with the Venice Biennale, the conceptual nature of reproduction directly with his sculpting work and his use of doubles and copies to question singularity and plurality of an artwork, and much later on in his career he took on the theme of existentialism and individuality; “the identity of the author, his condition as spectator, his lack of contact with a work that always precedes and supersedes him.” this raised the question of what is an artwork outside of the context explored by the artist; due to his ties to Art History as a discipline and a focus of his artistic direction, he was quite distant from the militant scenery of 1960’s art and instead recalled a lot inspiration from his purpose of advancing historical referents to influential artists and writers that preceded him such as Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer focused on the ideas of magic realism and the movement away from a literal perception of social context and commenting on the absurdity of reality and the human condition.

His association with Arte Povera contributed to the vastness of his exhibition work, He was first showcased in an exhibition in Rome in 1964 and from there went on to have his work showcased in exhibitions all throughout Europe, many of which took place in Turin, and further than that he went on to have his work showcased in the Sonnabed exhibition in New York City in 1972.