The book recounts the project "Il taglio, l'innesto, il castello" (The Cut, the Graft, the Castle) by the artists Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, winner of the PAC - Plan for Contemporary Art 2020 - Linea committenza (Contracting Line), promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, curated by Valentina Bruschi for the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Palermo). This is a participatory operation conceived with the aim of involving the community and the natural environment, involving both the ecological and social spheres. The origin of the research is an artistic experiment in ceramic workmanship, obtained by grafting with manna, a resin extracted from the carving of the trunk of ash trees, typical of the Madonie mountains. The title refers to the wound from which the manna flows, a sort of healing incision that generates new lymph and new forms when grafted into another material. The artists adopted a process of experimental research conducted during their artistic residency in the 14th-century Ventimiglia Castle, home of the Civic Museum of Castelbuono, an architectural archetype of a noble residence, later transformed into a civic institution, destined to host cultural activities for the community and the public. The publication bears witness to the complex phases of the creative process and its final outcome with the creation of a sculptural and performative installation that involves the spectator in a physical as well as visual experience. The group of sculptures finally enters the permanent collection of the Civic Museum of Castelbuono.

The duo Mangano & van Rooy formed in 2014 in Amsterdam. Their research and artistic practice address issues of a political nature and social architecture, with the aim of realising participatory projects and educational processes returned through different media, such as film, sculptural installations, performances and publications.

The history of Russian art between 1919 and 1930 offers numerous examples of collaboration between painters and writers who came into close contact in the avant-garde groups. Malevich, for his part, felt that the pictorial medium was insufficient to respond to the more precise demands of a new logical discourse, and in the summer of 1919 he temporarily abandoned painting in order to turn to the creation of theoretical texts. Rejecting the “imperfection of the ruffled brush” in favour of the “subtlety of the pen”, Malevich crossed the boundary between painter and philosopher. He did not write about Suprematism, but wrote as a Suprematist, drawing on the extra-pictorial consequences of the new meaning he attributed to painting.

Jean-Claude Marcadé, emeritus director of research at the C.N.R.S Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, has been the curator and scientific commissioner of numerous exhibitions, including the monographic exhibition dedicated to Malevich at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bilbao in 2006.

Nadia Caprioglio graduated from the University of Turin in Russian Language and Literature. She completed a PhD in Comparative Slavic Literature at the University of Milan and spent time at the A. Pushkin Institute of Russian Language and Literature in Moscow, the Lomosov University in Moscow, the Université Libre in Brussels and the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She has been a researcher at the University of Turin since 1992, and since the 1996-97 academic year has held the chair of Contemporary Russian Literature at the Faculty of Education where she holds courses on twentieth-century poetry and preparatory seminars on Russian versification.

The artist’s book brings together 138 drawings created by Marzia Migliora between 2006 and 2008.

The title Ink on paper incisively defines the content of the book, in which the choice of colour, limited to two Indian ink colours, red and black, determines the thread accompanying a journey through images without the aid of the written word. The book contains no critical apparatus or texts: a choice designed to highlight the expressive and evocative freedom of the language of drawing. The sequence of drawings traces a narrative thread that is composed in the eyes of the viewer without imposing a pre-established reading. The book is divided into six projects with a blank page, a pause, a breath to take the eye to another place. The subjects represented move from the woods to the high seas, from domestic interiors to spaces in which an undefined outline sees the protagonists floating in the white of the paper, the void. This too takes shape, becoming a consistent physical space: a place.

Drawing for Marzia Migliora is an act of discovery, a glance at her surroundings, a private act in close relation to her own reserve of past observations, the blank sheet of paper a condition of existence, the area in which to give birth to a situation and make it become conscious.

“The interviews collected here – from the first, given in 1962, to the last, published after his death in 1987 – allow us to appreciate Warhol’s constancy and his ability to continue to play the part of a sort of Sphinx swearing it has no enigma to offer.” (Alain Cueff).

There is probably no cultural personality who has been interviewed as frequently as Andy Warhol. His figure was perennially associated with the media and wherever he went, the press followed him. As far as possible, this book presents Warhol in all his dimensions over the twenty-five years he was in the spotlight. There are pieces focusing on every area of his vast oeuvre and voracious life: Andy as painter, filmmaker, publisher, promoter, performer, printmaker, photographer, author and videographer; there are interviews that illustrate Andy’s views on other artists; the experience of going shopping with him; what his feelings were about New York; how he perceived his Catholicism. Although we have tried to maintain a certain chronological balance, more than half of the interviews date from the 1960s, considered the most important period of his life. No changes have been made to the interviews, nor have revised versions of the texts been included.

Original title: I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR. Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987 (edited by Kenneth Goldsmith), Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York 2004.

This book is published on the occasion of the solo exhibition held at Institut Malthildenhöhe in Darmstadt from July 23rd to September 4th 2005. It collects 70 drawings by the artist and his text concerning some reflections over the contemporary painting role.

“These notes are for those who think my paintings are a more or less elegant exercise in decorative aestheticism. I would like to tell them that I believe and trust in the lyrical value of color and signs, but I do not think of painting, and art in general, as an escape from reality, a free zone. Just the opposite: I believe art continues to be a tool of awareness and therefore of immersion in reality.” (Giorgio Griffa)

Giorgio Griffa was born in Turin in 1936. Since 1968 he has held about one hundred solo shows in public and private spaces, including the 39th Venice Biennial in 1980, and the GAM in Turin in 2001-02. He has published the following texts: Non c’è rosa senza spine (Ed. Martano, Turin 1975); Cani sciolti antichisti (Martano and Samanedizioni, Genoa 1980); Drugstore Parnassus (Martano and Ottenhausen Verlag, Aachen 1981); In nascita di Cibera (Studio Noacco, Chieri 1989); 434-442-443-... (Ed. Franco Masoero, Turin 1992); Il principio di indeterminazione (Ed. Maestri Incisori, Milan 1994); Di segno in segno (with Martina Corgnati - Ed. Stefano Fumagalli, Bergamo 1995); Come un dialogo (Lorenzelli Arte, Milan 1997); Approdo a Gilania (Galleria Giancarlo Salzano, Turin 1998); Intelligenza della materia (Galleria Giancarlo Salzano, Turin 2000); 60 schizzi da opere 1968/2000 e un testo (Ed. Franco Masoero, Turin 2000); Nelle orme dei Cantos (Libri Scheiwiller, Milan 2001).

This book is a new, revised and corrected edition of the artist’s writings first published in 1985. In line with the work system adopted by Mario Merz, the transcription of the texts does not maintain a chronological order, but identifies three moments of typological distinction in which different referential identities emerge in the development of the writing.

“Voglio fare subito un libro” (I want to make a book right now) is a collection of published and unpublished texts written by Mario Merz up to 1985, in which the dialogue between the ’forces’ of art and those of literature erupts at times luxuriantly and brilliantly and at times harshly and critically; it is concentrated or dispersed in various topics that flow through the pages like a river in flood. The poetic freedoms that Mario Merz appropriates in the act of writing are interwoven with suggestions and references to his art. An art managed on the basis of inventions: of architectural structures (the progression of tables, spirals or the better-known igloos...), of pictorial constructions (which have developed since the birth of Merz the artist), on the natural cyclical and numerical development of the elements (the application of Fibonacci’s numerical progression), on the use of materials rejected by society (broken glass, old newspapers...), on strategic statements (“Se il nemico si concentra perde terreno, se si disperde perde forza”, “Objet cache-toi”, “Città irreale…”) which are included in his works as axioms and emerge as traces in the reading of this book.” Harald Szeemann