Niobide ferito, 1982
GPO-0471
Wounded Niobid
Photo emulsion on canvas
137 x 204 cm (two parts 137 x 102 cm each)
Present whereabouts unknown
In the incongruous backdrop of the double image of the ruins of the Library of Pergamum – the two perspectival views are upside down with respect to each other – the Wounded Niobid reclines in precarious balance between a full and a void, as if dragged by an unstoppable rotatory dynamic.
The work is part of a series of nine works, made between 1981 and 1982, in which each time the reproduction of the antique sculpture cited in the title is added to the landscape of ruins (GPO-0451, from GPO-0470 to GPO-0477). The group of works is related to the collages made in the same year for a book co-authored with René Denizot for the Galerie Yvon Lambert (De bouche à oreille / Hearsay, Paris 1982).
- Wounded Niobid, Roman copy from an original from the Late Hellenistic period, marble, Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence; reproduction from Francis Haskell, Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 279, fig. 147 (“Son of Niobe”).
• Image of the ruins from Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 72.
| • | M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira editore, 2008), cat. no. 471 p. 483, repr. |
