Books published by Marsilio

To speak of "restoration" in relation to contemporary art seems almost oxymoronic. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that the art produced in our own time is still too new to need conservation. On the other hand, with some artists deliberately seeking change or decay in their art through the use of perishable or unstable materials, the conceptual assumptions and technical practices governing conservation and restoration are being subjected to fascinating new challenges. Mass-produced objects, bread, beans, blood, excrement (human and animal), garbage, seeds, leaves, moving gears, lights and scents are just some of the materials that a restorer of contemporary art has to deal with. These wear out, grow rusty or moldy, fade, ferment, become infested by insects, stall, dry out. Each work of contemporary art is unique and unrepeatable--and consequently so is each intervention made by a conservator. Questions of how to conserve these kinds of artworks--and to what ends--have a critical bearing on how contemporary art is seen and understood. But the peculiarities of restoring contemporary art have received relatively little exploration or theorization outside of the technical conservation literature. Featuring interviews with curators and artists such as Roberto Cuoghi and Massimiliano Gioni, Art Work: Conserving and Restoring Contemporary Art fills this gap, inviting readers to explore how conservation practices are shaping the nature of the contemporary art object.

The most substantial monograph ever devoted to Albert Oehlen.Albert Oehlen has established himself as one of the leading figures in contemporary painting thanks to a continually evolving practice that focuses more on overcoming formal limitations and on experimentation than on the subject of the work. Music has played a central part in the artist’s output, serving as a metaphor for his method of working in which fusion and rhythm, improvisation and repetition, and density and harmony of sounds are turned into pictorial gestures.This monograph maps out a route through the whole of Albert Oehlen’s production, from his best-known works to less familiar ones and from the 1980s to the present day, with reproductions of paintings in the Pinault Collection and other major private collections and international museums.

The first monograph devoted to this great Italian artist.Franco Angeli was one of the leading figures in the Italian art of the postwar period. Often labeled superficially as “Pop,” he is revealed here, through new documents and studies, as an artist who took a surprising and unprecedented approach to his work.He made his debut in the fifties in a still little-known experimental Roman laboratory where the new generations encountered the masters of Italian art.This book reconstructs the stylistic and artistic reciprocities and the relations of Angeli with his friends and colleagues up until the sixties, a time when, with his attainment of an existential image that was at the same time deeply polemical and provocative, his work developed along versatile lines, in an original dialogue with the international context.

A project specially conceived by the artist, inspired by the masterpieces of the Cini Collection in Venice. An homage to Venice, Muniz’s project includes a series of completely new photos inspired by the old masters of the Cini Collection, paintings by the likes of Francesco Guardi, Dosso Dossi, and Canaletto. The artist revisits the theme of the capriccio in a contemporary key, simulating the brushstrokes with cuttings of illustrations from books on the history of art, carefully selected not only for their colors but also for the images they contain. Continuing the tradition of the artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, Muniz has rearranged these elements in a creative way, constructing new images that, through an interplay of allusions and quotations, intrigue and fascinate.

The thrilling urban experience of creating and developing a new city in France. Val d’Europe is a new city created in 1987, located next to the first tourist destination in Europe, Disneyland Paris. The challenge of this unique architectural and urban experience was to design, ex nihilo, a city that simultaneously represents beauty, practicality, and sustainability, creating social diversity without architectural discrimination, limiting the use of vehicles, and responding to ecological imperatives. This book presents, without concealing the difficulties, the process that was put into place in order to achieve the same urban quality as Europe’s most beautiful cities.

The catalog of the Italian national participation in the 2017 Venice Biennale. Three artists have been selected to represent Italy at the 2017 Venice Biennale: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey. They are relatively young artists, belonging to the same generation as the curator, and have been present on the international art scene since the year 2000. Their works speak global languages but are closely linked to the culture of Italy, without overlooking its current cosmopolitan aspect. Giorgio Andreotta Calò focuses on dialogues between space and artistic action, Roberto Cuoghi—the best known of the three—carries out research into memory and time, and Adelita Husni-Bey involves the public in artistic practices connected with history and social issues.

A complete and sumptuous survey of the brief but dazzling career of this great protagonist of Italian art. An extraordinary selection of works and a lavish set of illustrations reconstruct in an intimate and thorough way the brief but dazzling trajectory, between creative output and unbridled emotion, followed by Tancredi Parmeggiani, a great exponent of postwar Italian art. From his academic debut to the lyrical colorism of the early days, and from the experimentation typical of nonrepresentational spatialism to his period of gestural abstractionism, culminating in the visionary aesthetics of the sixties and characterized by uneasy and tormented figurations, this book reconstructs all the phases of his career.

The large building, today known as Les Docks, designed by Gustave Desplaces and constructed between 1858 and 1864 on the model of the warehouses in the docklands of London, looks like a stone ship looming over the wharves of the port of Marseille. Rightly or wrongly, its designer is credited with the idea of having associated the construction with a symbolic and imaginative calendar: 365 meters in length, the number of days in a year, four courtyards, like the seasons, fifty-two doors, and seven stories... Urban myth or the truth? What is certain is that esoteric symbolism and a taste for numbers were often the prerogative of master builders and architects and undoubtedly fascinate the Italians Alfonso Femia and Gianluca Peluffo of 5+1AA. Their renowned ability to bring together the know-how of artisans, artists, contractors, and suppliers of materials has produced a remarkable aesthetic result, in which color and material articulate the internal spaces, animated by stores, restaurants, and offices.

The rediscovery of a protagonist of Italian art. The first international monograph about Emilio Scanavino after his death, this book focuses on the wide breadth of his creative output, which began immediately after World War II and continued until the 1980s. He was one of the pioneers and protagonists of an innovative poetics of the “sign,” situating his practice between the Informel and Spazialismo movements and a new concept of the void. Scanavino’s art is characterized by a distinctive human quality: the gesture is the focus, and the intention is to penetrate the meaning of reality. He aimed to overcome the traditional notion of abstraction as lyrical, surreal, or constructive, whilst incorporating it into a new relationship of the image with reality.

Company archives can provide real surprises. But few can also convey a sense of history like those of the Generali. The structure of the books, one devoted to the ninteenth-century and one to the twentieth-century, is based on closely related document entries and personnel entries, centered on particular events and personalities connected with the Assicurazioni Generali, the largest insurance company in Italy and third in the world, starting out from some of the most significant records preserved in the insurance company’s historical archives. General historical profiles and short accounts of curiosities from contemporary news reports set the entries against their national and international background. The lavishly illustrated volumes are completed by essays on specific aspects of the company’s history and its archives, and by a comprehensive index of all the management positions from 1831 to 1981, in alphabetical and chronological order.

A seminal experience on the Italian art scene of the 1960s. At the height of the economic miracle of the 1960s, artistic experiments in Italy kept following one another, mixed and merged with an extraordinary speed and intensity.The common aim was to emerge from the disillusionment of the postwar period to build a new vocabulary of signs and images, able to restore the ferment of society and contemporary culture. The book is dedicated to the propositional wealth of that decade, based on a new perspective on the Italian art of those years. The artists represented include Franco Angeli, Domenico Gnoli, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Mario Schifano, creators of a new and original direction that typified Italian art in that period, of which the book offers ideas, studies, and curiosities.