Paul Thek’s Italian experiences between 1962 and 1976 left a deep mark on his sensitivity. From his visits to the Capuchin Catacombs to his witnessing of spectacular religious processions, Italy was a catalyst for several key moments in the artist’s career, triggering an elusive reaction in his practice to the trajectories of post-war American art. By reworking the stimuli gathered during his stays in Rome, on the island of Ponza and in Sicily, Paul Thek concocted a baroque response to Pop Art and Minimalism, which were dominant on the art scene of the time.

Texts by Nicola Del Roscio, Peter Benson Miller, Owen Laub, Robert Wilson. Designed by Francesca Biagiotti.

Texts by Tina Barouti, Anne-Grit Becker, Natalie Dupêcher. Photographs by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

In the fall of 1952, Cy Twombly receives a traveling scholarship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York for his first trip to Europe and North Africa. He meets up with Robert Rauschenberg in Casablanca, and the two of them travel to Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains, and then to Tangier. They pay a visit to Paul Bowles in Tétouan and go on day trips with him to nearby villages and Roman ruins. Twombly conducts his first and last archaeological excavation there. Upon their return to Rome in February 1953, Twombly studies and sketches the ethnographic objects and tribal artifacts he sees on display in the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini. These sketches survive in the form of the North African Sketchbooks. Much of the surviving work from this trip consists of photographs taken with a Rolleiflex shared by the artists and sketches made by them, preserved in the archives of the Cy Twombly Foundation and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio; they provide a unique perspective on Twombly’s lesser-known affinity for Africa’s Mediterranean shores.

Falce e martello: tre dei modi con cui un artista può contribuire alla lotta di classe (“Hammer and Sickle: three of the ways an artist can contribute to the class struggle”) by Enzo Mari was the catalogue that accompanied his exhibition at the Galleria Milano in 1973. Today, the exhibition is re-proposed, with the same display and in the same historical Milanese gallery; this anastatic reprint of the catalogue is enriched with photographs and documents from the archives of the Gallery and from the Mari Archive, along with an essay by Bianca Trevisan which retraces the planning itinerary undertaken by the Milanese artist and designer, and an essay by Riccardo Venturi outlining the historical, artistic and political debate that the project was part of, and which was accompanied by a film that sparked a degree of controversy at the time. A snapshot of that tinderbox which was 1970s Italy, and a reflection on the hammer and sickle: the most iconic symbol of the whole of the twentieth century.

Haris Epaminonda uses video and film, collage, photography, books and objects in an extensive process of assembling and disassembling appropriated materials to reconstruct non-linear narratives. The artist works with found images from the past – sometimes faded travel photographs, or the pages of old nature magazines, ethnographic artifacts or footage from forgotten television programmes. Epaminonda then manipulates the images, cutting and layering, to create new works that feel wholly part of the present.

In tracing some of the notions and narratives embedded in Chapters, a 16 mm film shot in Cyprus in 2012, the idea of making a book came about as an exercise, or rather an experiment, to deconstruct the film into some of its subject matters. Embarking on a new set of associations between image and subject, source and information, meaning and abstraction, this book is both a document and a memory map, tracing the beginnings of a thought, a time, an image, a place.

Chapters I–XXX is published and presented in conjunction with the exhibitions Haris Epaminonda. Chapter IV at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, 14 March–18 May 2014; Haris Epaminonda. Vol. XIV at Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, 25 March–18 May, 2014.