The series of catalogues published by hopefulmonster for GAM, Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Torino, reserved for artists of the new generation, continues with a monography dedicated to the Italian artist Sabrina Mezzaqui for the exhibition held at GAM from November 9th 2006 to January 28th, 2007.

The catalogue, that tells deeply about the artistic personality of the artist through his works, opens with the photographic documentation of the exhibition to tell then through the images the art of Mezzaqui from 1990’s up to today, showing installations made by large found objects and paint. She assembles these objects to create new spaces and sculptures. Sabrina Mezzaqui focusses her attention on the most minute things in life. Hers is a really reserved and solitary work, made of repeated gestures, of times dilated up to the point that they become a sort of reflective and auto-imposed discipline, of manual skill and exercise dropped into the temporal suspension of a ritual. Mezzaqui uses ordinary materials: pencil or felt-pen drawing, paper, cut-outs. Also writing is often part of the work, recovered or transformed, or even only imagined or again denied in the chequering of a partially cut sheet whose cut off pieces fall to the floor, suspended between persistence and instability. In her installations, projections of shadow or light or again images of reallife filming with fixed camera, achieve strong suggestions.

The book includes one essay by Elena Volpato, a poem by Mariangela Gualtieri and some writings of the artist.

The monograph reproduces the photographic documentation of the solo exhibitions held in 2005 at the Fondazione Merz, Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum and GAM Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, representing the most important spaces dedicated to contemporary art in Torino. This monograph, the most complete published collection on the artist, contains the complete iconographic documentation of his artworks, representing an archival documentation and providing an unprecedented understanding of Merz’s working process.
The volume includes a comprehensive artistic career history, bibliography and biographical chronology and which is the most updated and complete examination of the artist. The book is enriched by the inclusion of unpublished material showed for the first time at the Fondazione Merz. It documents Mario Merz selected artistic production, including paintings, sculpture, installations, drawings, neon and Fibonacci series works. Some critical essays complete the volume, providing a deep and high reflections on the artist and his significative role in contemporary art.

This volume marks the start of a series dedicated to contemporary art promoted and coordinated by Catalogarte. Archivio del catalogo d’esposizione d’arte moderna e contemporanea, set up in 1985 at the Department of Culture. For twenty years Catalogarte. Archivio del catalogo d’esposizione di arte moderna e contemporanea has been documenting and preserving the historical memory of exhibitions in Turin and Piedmont. This is the basis for the decision to give the Archive a series of publications which, through its double value as a tool for documentation and analysis, provides, with the succession of volumes, a useful contribution to the in-depth study and knowledge of particular themes and topics stimulated by the daily evolution of artistic events, reconstructing their history and providing of reference from which certain events and experiences originate in a straightforward way that nevertheless reflects any problem areas, in order to evaluate better not only the premises but also their development. 

The book is the catalogue of Tony Cragg’s solo exhibition, curated by Ludovico Pratesi at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro, from 22 July to 7 September 2006. The exhibition, created to celebrate the first ten years of the centre’s opening, consisted of seven monumental sculptures made in recent years, from 1999 to 2006. The sculptures, all in different materials, underline one of the most interesting aspects of the artist’s work and research: the relationship between form and material. The book, which includes a wealth of images of the installation, includes a conversation between the artist and the curator, a critical text by Ludovico Pratesi and an in-depth biography and bibliography of the English artist.

The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Fragments from a chromatic discussion 1990-2005 held at Archivio di Stato in Turin from March 24th to May 3rd, 2006.

The show collects 80 paintings created by the artist from 1990 to 2005 and reproduced in this book. This tells deeply about the artistic personality of Renata Rampazzi through her works in which the tracks of the brush, charged with diluted colour, combine, lose themselves in each other, and belong only to their growth in intensity, opening up to symbiosis, to mutations like all vital and natural events, when they enter into the generational dimension that appears between matter and spirit. We find ourselves before a thin, vaporous painting betraying the pressure exercised on its “skin” by effects of sensible currents of energy, which lays bare vaguely libidinous flashes of memory and is sublimed by phosphorescences of hidden lights.

The book, curated by Marisa Vescovo, also includes a text by the Italian writer Lidia Ravera.

“Night. Not a single star in the sky…" In the darkness and silence of a city of tall, blackened buildings, Evelina dreams of opening a thousand-star hotel, the most luxurious and brightest ever built. And in her dream, Evelina imagines colourful and wonderful rooms. The meeting of Dario Voltolini’s words with Nicola De Maria’s pictorial language gives birth to a marvellous dream that exhorts to life so that “... we know that anger is also needed to give a beautiful colour to a world that otherwise dies”.

Thanks to the synergy between the art of writing and the art of images, La favola dell’arte offers children a fabulous way to enter the world of contemporary art, a useful means of entertainment and knowledge at the same time.

Nicola De Maria was born in Foglianise in 1954. “Since the mid-1970s the artist has been experimenting with an original language in which abstraction is charged with poetic figurative allusions, archetypal expressions of nature, joy and passion. His painting thrives on simple forms and pure colours”. (Achille Bonito Oliva)

Dario Voltolini was born in Turin in 1959. He has published Una intuizione metropolitana (Bollati Boringhieri, 1990), Rincorse (Einaudi, 1994), Forme d’onda (Feltrinelli, 1996), 10 (Feltrinelli, 2000), Primaverile (Feltrinelli, 2001), I confini di Torino (Quiritta, 2003) and Il tempo della luce (Effigie, 2005). With Giulio Mozzi he has published Sotto i cieli d’Italia (Sironi, 2004) and with Antonio Moresco he edited the collective volume Scrivere sul fronte occidentale (Feltrinelli, 2002). He also works as a librettist with composer Nicola Campogrande.