Fondazione Merz in Turin from April 27th to July 29th, 2007. This book presents works since 1954, illustrating 300 drawings by Mario Merz. The majority of the artist’s sketches have never before been published and there has been little theoretical attempt to understand this crucial aspect of his career. For him, with the exception of writing, drawing was the only medium to accompany life, at home and on one’s travels, not only because it requires little in the way of materials and can be done anywhere and everywhere, but because drawing can match our mental and physical movements.

This book illustrates from the series of drawings on Objet cache-toi (Object, hide yourself) to the themes of the tables, cups and groups dedicated to the Giardino dei gufi (Garden of the owls), Semi floreali volanti (Flying flower seeds) and the Disegni di Sidney (Sydney drawings), as well as the large works depicting the prehistoric “terrible animals”.

The book includes an essay by Dieter Schwarz (Director of Kunstmuseum in Winterthur), Claire Gilman and a selected chronology by Lara Conte.

The book was published on the occasion of the Come in terra così in cielo exhibition organised by the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro from 24 March to 13 May 2007.

The exhibition project stemmed from the idea of transforming the former Chiesa del Suffragio into a total work of art, working on the relationship between light and architecture. Passi, the installation inside the former church, consists of a floor of mirrors that reflects the entire space, creating an evocative play of refractions and deformations. The mirror on which the public walks, contributing to its demolition, returns a deformed, fragmented image of the environment, preventing a global, composed vision. Every step is another crack in the reflective surface, breaking through the pilasters of the walls and the wooden beams of the ceiling: the space becomes a shattered image, while the architecture becomes an open, total work. On the walls, the artist has placed vertical watercolours, called Acque, which recall the shape of large windows and suggest the sliding of water over glass.

The texts and the interview with the artist are edited by Ludovico Pratesi. The descriptions of the works, edited by Alfredo Pirri, accompany the images and contain his reflections, almost a personal journey that includes the significant moments of his artistic research, united by a strong and incisive sensitivity.

The ART IN THE CITY project aims to analyse the relationship between Italian artists of recent generations and the urban context through the realisation of projects designed specifically for the Cinecittà district, characterised by the presence of the film studios and the Cinecittàdue shopping centre, the only one in Italy to have an exhibition space within set aside expressly for contemporary art. ART IN THE CITY takes the form of a series of one-man shows dedicated to Italian artists of recent generations, displayed within the exhibition space at Cinecittàdue. Each of the artists invited is requested to interpret the genius loci of the Cinecittà district through a site-specific project realised for the occasion. Waiting for the early bus is the first result of the cycle, produced by Botto & Bruno, who have interpreted the relationship between the exhibition space and the urban context surrounding it. Botto & Bruno’s installation overturns the relationship between inside and outside, transforming the space into a portion of the city seen as a moment drawn from daily life and an open space in which the contradictions of the city outskirts are stressed, perceived as they are by the young as an alternative territory that is vital and alienating at the same time.

The book includes the photographic documentation of the site specific project and its work in progress. Essays are edited by Marco Lodoli, Ludovico Pratesi and Simona Brunetti.

Giovanni Anselmo is one of the most radical artists of Arte Povera. The capacity of communicating complex themes such as Everything, Particular and Infinite through simple and extremly synthetic immages caracterize his creative art. His artworks are capable of provoking primary energies in the moment materials such as stone, water, steel are transformed into pure tension. Made from organic and inorganic materials such as stone, earth, metal, water and cotton, Anselmo’s works are installed and dotted around in the main exhibition spaces of the gallery. Rather than acting as separate metaphors or simulacra, they embody and translate into perceptible experience basic but generally unnoticed phenomena of knowledge: gravity, energy, the relation between general and particular, finite and infinite, culture and nature, the flow of historic time and the hypothesis of the eternity of universal physical laws, the realist, almost scientific method of experiencing and the abstraction of philosophical principles.

The catalogue is pubblished in occasion of the exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna and offers a complete documentation of the artist's research through his artworks: it also contains a comprehensive biographic profile and bibliography and new critical essays by Tacita Dean, Rosalind Krauss, Susan van de Ven and Gianfranco Maraniello and an interview with the artist curatedd by Andrea Viliani.

Giovanni Anselmo was born in Borgofranco d’Ivrea in 1934. He lives and works in Turin. In 1990 he was awarded the Golden Lion for painting at the 44th Venice Biennale.

The artist’s book is published on the occasion of Tanatosi (Thanatosis), a project by the Italian artist Marzia Migliora, curated by Beatrice Merz, held at the Merz Foundation in Torino, from 9 November 2006.

Perception is the guiding thread, and the use of all our senses becomes the unit of measure and the instrument for relating with the external world.

The artist develops this theme into a wider discourse, reflecting in particular on the state of blindness. This becomes a metaphor for fears which cannot be seen or touched but which are such ‘solid’ presences that the perception of reality is altered.

This cycle of works attempts to stimulate the seeing spectator to look not only by means of their eyes but also, for example, by creating a tactile relationship with objects or by listening to the sound that is refracted in space.

The artist gets the sighted person to put themself in the shoes of the person who cannot see, and gives the unsighted person various useful instruments for enjoying an exhibition of contemporary art.

Touching, looking, listening, counting... like an exercise that results from experience.

This book accompanies the project, recounting the stages of the exhibition through relief drawings and texts in Braille. It also includes the photographic documentation of the exhibition, together with a text by Jérôme Sans, artistic director of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (Great Britain).

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.