A Certain Number of Things
Can a book tell the story of a person through a catalog of objects as if they were an artwork altogether? A Certain Number of Things is the story of the life of Cesare Pietroiusti, one of the major Italian contemporary artists, built around sixty-three+one things (objects, materials, narrated souvenirs, documents and drawings, photographs and sculptures) that, altogether constitute an autobiography-per-objects, one per year, from 1955 to 2019. An inextricable combination of life and artistic research, of narrative texts and visual documents, but also of different times, in a vision that opens the past to always renewed meanings. An original tool to explore and interpret the work of one of the precursors of the so-called relational art.
Cesare Pietroiusti’s artistic research was developed with a great methodological and linguistic independence, out of the logics of the gallery, the museum and the art market, but also of the artistic disciplines themselves. Original interpreter of the performative and relational practice, the artist, trained as a psychiatric doctor, moved between conceptual reflection and group experimentation, demonstrating a particular interest toward apparently insignificant or paradoxical situations and objects, often considered not worth the attention, investigation or representation.
- 17 x 24 cm
- 256
- IT
- 2019
- 978-88-8056-002-9
