Emilio Prini, Oggetti a Consumo, 1969. Courtesy Archivio Emilio Prini Emilio Prini (1942–2016) was, by many measures a unique figure on the Italian and global art scene. His career is intrinsically linked to the Arte Povera movement, but his unique approach to visual expression sets him apart from his contemporaries. Among his intriguing visual explorations are typewriter drawings, which are regarded more as visual explorations and notes than works of art per se.
Focusing on this aspect of the artist's oeuvre and bringing it in connection to three exhibitions—Gennaio '70 – comportamenti, progetti, mediazioni (Bologna, 1970), Arte Povera – 13 Italian Artists (Munich, 1971) and Merce Tipo Standard (Rome, 1971)—makes the conceptual core of the exhibition at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano, titled Emilio Prini – Typewriter Drawings. Bologna/München/Rome – 1970/1971.
"It was important for us to emphasize how all these documents, works, and drawings cannot be uniquely defined, but are an index, a blurred portrait of the artist's continuous artistic research," explained curators Luca Lo Pinto and Andrea Viliani with Timotea Prini.
Emilio Prini had a saying that in Italy, there are not just three dominant arts, sculpture painting, and architecture, but also Arte Povera. The movement that emerged from the 1960s conceptual practices exploring immaterial, performative aspects of art making, and also—in the context of class struggles of the period—the relationship between high and low art, became known for its formal and material radicalism. The unusual processes artists deployed also came to define the movement. Dominant in the 1960s and 1970s with many followers in the following decades, Arte Povera criticized modernization and commercialization of culture, and relied on pre-war avant-gardes in their engagement with life, attacking the idea of an elitist culture.
Prini's art also questioned the art institution and the role of artists, as his notebooks reveal. "Especially between the late 1960s and mid-1970s…he investigated almost obsessively the role of the artist, the status of the work, the conventions and contradictions of the art system, and the concept of work and value in relation to art making. In a sense, both the works and photos in Bolzano illustrate this polyphony of thoughts," explain curators.
The Arte Povera-Im Spazio exhibition in Genoa in 1967 marks Prini's debut on the art scene, and the debut of Arte Povera as well. In the following years, he participated in most significant international exhibitions, culminating with Contemporanea, 1973-74, after which his presence on the scene gradually decreased. The set of works and ideas he developed in this period built a foundation for his later investigations, and he continued to modify and rework them until his death. Many of the works he conceived in his early years were only exhibited later in his career. The exhibition in Bolzano features his drawings related to the concepts he developed in the three mentioned exhibitions, together with some archival photography.
Around 1969, Prini focused his attention on the notions of art production, and used different technical devices to make and evaluate art, in line with Marxist use-value theory. "Unlike the minimal formalization of many conceptual works, his works are therefore a much alive fusion between work and document," assert curators. "They translate a constantly ongoing verification process. They are structured as a research permanently in-progress."
For the exhibition in Bologna, his devices of choice were TV screens; in Munich, he continued his exploration of the working hours and exhaustion of TV sets with a technician's help and measured light and sound energy. The exhibition in Rome was a demonstration, in which Prini installed a van of a Roman video company in the gallery, together with a close-circuit TV system. This was yet antoher of his experiments with the use-value and aesthetic aspects of modern technology.
Information and knowledge were Prini's primary focus; the ways in which they get formed, transmitted, and "how knowledge makes us responsible for a certain phenomenon or in a certain context."
His typewriter drawings, created between 1970 and 1975 on an Olivetti 22 typewriter and numbering nearly 200, define his aesthetics and poetic approach—the mechanical device in his hands became a tool to record drawings, rhymes, ideas, mathematical formulas, and two-dimensional architectures.
"Prini, who made his debut with the first Arte Povera exhibition in 1967 curated by Celant at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, was perhaps the most radical interpreter, as well as in many respects the catalyst, of the theorization of Arte Povera," the curators explain. "The work itself becomes a coagulation of matter and thought, object and subject, together with co-authors of the work."
Ahead of his time in breaking the boundaries of the art institution and introducing unique visual language that remains both arresting in its minimalism and yet thought-provoking for its profound considerations of our times, Emilio Prini is still awaiting to be discovered and theorized in full.
Organized in collaboration with the Archive Emilio Prini, the exhibition Emilio Prini–Typewriter Drawings. Bologna/München/Rome – 1970/1971 will be on view at Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano until May 3rd, 2025.
