The book Iconography and Archetypes. The Form of Painting 1985-1994 by Mario Diacono was published at the end of April 2010 by Silvana Editoriale.
The volume collects texts written over a long period of time to accompany exhibitions held in the Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston and New York. The critical texts refer to more than thirty American, Italian and German artists.
The dates 1985-1994 do not entirely coincide with the years in which all the texts published here have appeared, but refer to the decade in which the artists discussed were first exhibited. The year 1994 saw the emergence of a new generation of American artists, many of them with a singular conceptual/factural program, for whom, for the first time in decades, no common denominator could be found to group them in any loose -ism or art movement. This is in contrast with the 1980s, when the Neo-Expressionists quickly became historically intertwined with Neo-Geo Abstractionists and Appropriationists—many of whom are juxtaposed here for their distinctive approach to the (re)construction of painting and their peculiar iconographic impulse. It is in fact the complex pluralism of the art of the 1980s that constitutes the implicit narrative of this volume. With one exception or two, all the artists about whose work these texts were written are painters, which explains the secondary title adopted for the book. The author’s decision to focus on painting was partly due to the pre-eminence that this medium—deconstructed and reshaped—had taken after the Minimalist, Conceptualist, Poverist, Post-Minimalist, and Performance years at the time he first opened his gallery in Italy. Most of all, though, it is indebted to the fact that, but for the one-person movements of Duchamp and Beuys, the evolution of art in the twentieth century up to the early 1960s had been paced by painting, and painting became in the 1980s the form where the interrogation of art was taking place at the moment of its perceived historical completion.
The book also offers an in-depth critical view regarding a part of the Maramotti Collection’s American artworks, some of which are in the permanent exhibition, as an alternative to a traditional catalogue.
In fact, most of the artworks considered in the volume have been acquired by the collector Achille Maramotti due to his particular interest in the evolution of the language of painting. This provides evidence of the close relationship and the intense thirty-years-long intellectual exchange between the author and the collector.
Mario Diacono
Iconography and Archetypes. The Form of Painting 1985-1994
pagg. 488, 17x24 cm
90 colour reproductions
cover: Peter Halley
English edition
ISBN/EAN: 9788836616336
The volume may be purchased in bookshops or online on the webiste of Silvana Editoriale
Critical essays about:
Georg Baselitz
Ross Bleckner
Richmond Burton
Bruno Ceccobelli
Sandro Chia
Francesco Clemente
Enzo Cucchi
Nicola De Maria
Moira Dryer
Eric Fischl
Günther Förg
Peter Halley
Roni Horn
Alex Katz
Annette Lemieux
Sherrie Levine
Gerhard Merz
Matt Mullican
Mimmo Paladino
Claudio Parmiggiani
PieroPizzi Cannella
Sigmar Polke
Lucio Pozzi
David Salle
Julian Schnabel
Ray Smith
Philip Taaffe
Rosemarie Trockel
Meyer Vaisman
Michael Van Ofen
Terry Winters