EXHIBITIONS

Two motivations triggered me to propose this project: The Italian movement Arte Povera which became a very important international part of the Avant Garde of the 60’s/70’s was also one of my favorite movements of the recent part of Contemporary Art and still less recognized as related movements of American Contemporary Art. I came across of many of these artists in exhibitions I visited during my early studies at the very Kunstmuseum of Lucerne, where my predecessor J. C. Ammann presented a survey in 1971 entitled "Visualisierte Denkprozesse" (Visualized Thought Processes), following up Germano Celant creation ARTE POVERA. and he afterwards presented some artists individually, like Kounellis, Penone, Zorio. Paolini was not one of the most important art creators of that time and movement. I had the chance to collaborate with him and all the others from Kounellis to Merz when I was a curator for the main pavilion of Venice Biennale in the Giardini “Anni Settanta” in 1980. So, we could further develop this project. Paolini is very well planning and conceiving his exhibitions which mostly are curated and conceived as a work of its own, an installation of its own and also combined with a publication of its own. I liked this approach. But as a curator and visitor of exhibitions I like to see always also the whole context of the work, a broader vision in which this work is placed. So, we created the idea to move most of the documentation of his body of work in the form of a publication, which would become the second body or head of a JANUS which brings the two volumes become a whole. Frequently these two volumes have gotten separated, one as artist book, the other as a typical catalogue and split from one another. But originally, they were hold together by a golden paper band.