“Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries” is a solo exhibition by Alessandro Di Pietro, a challenge supported by the Italian Council (XI edizione, 2022)—a world program supporting modern Italian artwork promoted by the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea on the Ministry of Tradition—and curated by Peter Benson Miller and Cornelia Mattiacci.

“Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries” includes a collection of recent works—a number of sculptures, a portray and a movie—by Alessandro Di Pietro, conceived in dialogue with the life and work of American artist Paul Thek (1933–88). Throughout a residency on the American Academy in Rome in 2017, Di Pietro started exploring an imagined state of affairs wherein Thek—who died of AIDS at age 54—didn’t disappear, however continued to make artistic endeavors. Self-consciously merging truth and fiction, this challenge evokes Thek’s lasting, however phantomlike affect on the work of up to date artists right now.

“My intent was to ghostwrite for Paul Thek” explains Di Pietro “I continued his mysterious narratives in my phrases, adjusting them to the discourses surrounding right now’s historical past: the socio-political narratives and details of our time. My course of was imagining how a narrative—on this case, the story of an artist’s work—might need continued if it hadn’t been lower brief.”

“Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries” benefitted from Di Pietro’s residency and exhibition on the Watermill Heart in Watermill, New York (USA), a associate within the challenge. An experimental heart for modern arts, Watermill, which conserves a big assortment of Thek’s work and the artist’s archive, and Di Pietro’s expertise there, formed Race of a Hippie, a brief movie impressed by Thek’s iconic The Tomb (additionally known as Loss of life of a Hippie) from 1967. The Tomb, now misplaced, that includes a life-size effigy of the artist’s personal physique put in within the inside a ziggurat, staged the dying and resurrection of the artist. Equally, different works within the present exhibition, sculptures Child Solid, Br’er Rabbit, To Receivedg, and the portray Tv/Collaboration, evoke particular motifs, supplies, and subversive methods recurring in Thek’s work. Di Pietro attracts on biographical details and broader social points from a steady current, stretching from the Sixties to right now. Blurring truth and fiction, and exploring questions of affect, appropriation and inventive company, the exhibition plumbs and updates Thek’s trenchant critique of the artwork world and society at massive. Specializing in processes of normalization and deviation from the standardized and canonical, Di Pietro’s works look again to the nineteenth-century debates on monstrosity and anomalies in human and animal anatomy, whereas imagining future manifestations of this discourse by means of performative object environments. He explores how the illustration of otherness and monstrosity may be thought of utopian in a recent actuality the place all the things is listed and hyper-normalized. His strategy attracts on the sources of linguistic buildings and cinematic grammar, creating environments producing new realities.

Providing a sequel to “Paul Thek. Italian Hours,” held on the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in 2022—the primary exhibition devoted to Thek in Italy since 1995—Di Pietro’s work additional explores the American artist’s function as a precursor and collaborator persevering with to hang-out the preoccupations of up to date artists. As such, “Ghostwriting Paul Thek” underlines the mission of the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio to help rising artists, particularly these participating the work of the postwar avant-garde.

The guide accompanying the exhibition, edited by Miller and Mattiacci primarily based on an idea developed by Di Pietro, and printed by Mousse, shall be offered at Madre in Could 2024 to mark the entry of the works into that assortment.

at Fondazione Nicola del Roscio, Rome
till April 5, 2024