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.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the show of the Italian artist Luisa Rabbia at the Fondazione Merz from 19 June to 20 September 2009. The exhibition evolves around three central works, consisting of a video and two installations, with traveling as the main theme, through an intimate, imaginary and surreal journey. Luisa Rabbia combines her own world of loneliness, fear, anxiety and personal memories with images taken from other people’s lives. The result is a sort of diary, a narrative that develops through a net of drawings: endless roots, fragments of the artist’s work and clips from her previous videos that are all like blood vessels of a life journey.

From January 23 to February 27 2010, the exhibition will be hosted by the Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

This is the fourth publication belonging to fondazione merz i quaderni series and it presents the exhibition hopes & doubts (curated by Costantino D’Orazio) held at Fondazione Merz from 22 January to 1 March 2009. Eight Lebanese and eight Italian artists showcase their work in both Beirut (Lebanon) and Turin (Italy). The cutting edge body of work will focus on daily life, translating the special emotional condition of the Lebanese people into paintings, photography, video and installation.

At the same time as the exhibition hopes & doubts the Fondazione Merz presented the solo show of Gabriele Basilico, Beirut 1991, which includes about twenty photographs taken from the great photographic service shot in Beirut in 1991 at the end of the civil war that devastated the country. The result is a photographic document that intends to reflect on what remains of a city after the conflict of war and how it prepares to ‘start again’.

Artists: Gabriele Basilico, Elisabetta Benassi, Ginou Choueiri, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Michael Fliri, Francesco Gennari, Pascal Hachem, Lina Hakim, Joanne Issa, Zena el Khalil, Marzia Migliora, Randa Mirza, Giuseppe Pietroniro, Luisa Rabbia, Marwan Rechmaoui, Rima Saab, Andrea Salvino.

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 book collects the multi-faceted project that Matthew Barney developed in 3 days in Turin and documents the different parts of it: the solo exhibition at the Fondazione Merz (30 October 2008 - 11 January 2009), a workshop with the students of the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and University of Turin, a public meeting between the artist and Richard Flood, opened by a paper written for the occasion by Arthur C. Danto, and a series of films screened at the Cinema Massimo.

Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and was raised in Boise, Idaho. He attended Yale University, receiving his BA in 1989, then moved to New York City, where he lives today. From his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that includes feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing. In his first solo exhibitions, Barney presented elaborate sculptural installations that included videos of himself interacting with various constructed objects and performing physical feats such as climbing across the gallery ceiling suspended from titanium ice screws. In 1992, Barney introduced fantastical creatures into his work, a gesture that presaged the vocabulary of his subsequent narrative films. In 1994, Barney began work on his epic Cremaster cycle, a five-part film project accompanied by related sculptures, photographs, and drawings. He completed the cycle in 2002. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum of artwork from the entire project, premiered at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in June 2002 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in October 2002 before its presentation in New York.

This third quaderno is dedicated to Gino De Dominicis, as Andrea Bellini writes “can be considered one of the most emblematic and mysterious figures in the history of Italian art in the post-WWII period. He is still in many ways something of a mystery, surrounded by a legendary aura. De Dominicis was and remains an isolated case, a complex personality who always turned his back on the logic of groups and movements, cultivating a superior, noble, and solitary notion of artistic creation.”

i quaderni is a series of slender books aiming to inform the public of all the activities promoted by the Torinese institution. Each issue is based upon an event of particular importance – to be documented with images in a manner that is better and more comprehensive than the eventual catalogue – and so recreate the entire season of which it is a part, recording the gossamer threads the things of art follow. Threads that echo an interrupted dialogue with Mario Merz, with his works that are preserved and presented by the fondazione, and with his writings, an unpublished selection of which will be presented in each issue of i quaderni. Every quaderno will be rounded off with a section of Technical notes, with the lists of works exhibited, and a Chronology presenting, in synoptic tables, the complex itinerary packed with performances, readings, didactic activities, congresses, planned by the scientific committee which, alongside its president, Beatrice Merz, comprises Richard Flood (The New Museum, New York), Dieter Schwarz (Kunstmuseum, Winthertur) and Vicente Todolí (Tate Modern, London).