Author Description

Gianfranco Zappettini's artistic development has been reminiscent of a Bildungsroman; indeed, it has resembled even more closely an initiatory journey based on experience, encompassing such aspects as vocation, research, success, deep-seated doubt, crisis, rejection, abandonment, oblivion, travel, inner excavation and, last of all, return -- these aspects have marked some of the decisive moments not only of the life of the artist, but also of his art. Marco Meneguzzo. From his debut in Genoa in 1962 with accomplished abstract and structuralist works, via his success in the 1970s -- culminating in his appearance at Documenta 6 in 1977 -- and his re-imagining of painting in the '80s, all the way to the fulfilling period that continues into the present day, Gianfranco Zappettini (Genoa, 1939) has been an international leading light of the so-called Analytical Painting movement. The rigour with which he has addressed the questions inherent in the medium and the surface, excluding all forms of pictorial storytelling, has resulted in him becoming an important touchstone for the more conceptual side of the movement, the star of which is once again in the ascendant. In this catalogue raisonné, which compiles more than 2500 works created up until 2021, the artist's substantial output is given an exceptionally useful frame of reference for the collector and the connoisseur, while also making a wealth of knowledge available to the historian and the scholar. Put together by Marco Meneguzzo, alongside the catalogue of works per se the volume also includes an in-depth historical/critical essay that contextualises Zappettini's work in international terms, as well as a critical anthology and a comprehensive apparatus.