First comprehensive monograph on Guglielmo Castelli's painting and sculpture.
Published on the occasion of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Guglielmo Castelli: Sweet Baby Motel is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist's painting and sculpture. The publication conducts a wide-ranging investigation into the artist's ethereal poetics, including newly commissioned essays by the curators of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Kunsthalle Wien, and by art historian and critic Lillian Davies. Davies explores the enigmatic depths of Castelli's painting practice, and curator Sarah Crowe pays particular attention to the artist's weightless, boneless, and genderless figures. Francesco Manacorda interviews the artist on his scenographic, filmic approach.
Castelli developed a new corpus of works for the exhibitions in Turin and Vienna that spans painting, collage, and sculpture, and culminates in a selection of his sketchbooks. Facilitating a deep understanding of process and intimate aspects of Castelli's practice, these sketchbooks are invaluable repositories of creative trajectories, containing references from different places and times, which are then carefully selected by the artist to flow into his work.
The sketchbooks and the artistic process they embody guide the temporal structure and artistic intimacy of the publication. Castelli constellates myriad materials—from preliminary drawings and notes to poetry excerpts and fabric cutoffs—as conceptual inspiration for bodies of work that he conceives as fully fledged exhibitions. In the publication, examples of these collaged fields of associations preface documentation of individual exhibitions and their groups of work, thus bringing the artist's practice full circle.
