EMILIO PRINI
…E Prini

27.10.2023 – 1.4.2024
Macro – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome

…E Prini is the most extensive exhibition ever dedicated to the work of Emilio Prini (Stresa, 1943 – Rome, 2016). Comprising of over 250 works, the exhibition project, realized in collaboration with the Archivio Emilio Prini, is conceived according to a chronological path which spans fifty years, from 1966 to 2016, to reconstruct the work of one of Italy’s most complex and enigmatic artistic figures from the recent past, whose work has not been fully surveyed to this day.
“I don’t have a plan, I proceed through trial and error” declared the artist. He considered his oeuvre to be a unique path made up of constant re-writing, in which works function almost like the proof of an empirical and aesthetic verification of some postulates or concepts, such as the idea of the standard or of the void, through a series of data drawn from reality and subsequently put together. Prini always refused to understand a work of art as a closed and defined object, and as a result, he also questioned the codes defining how art is shown. The exhibition project thus attempts to reflect and make this position explicit. …E Prini develops like a temporal perimeter and visual horizon in which works, photographs, invitations, typescripts and interventions on catalogues are exhibited without any form of distinction, along the walls of MACRO’s largest gallery, while sculptures and three-dimensional objects are laid out at the center of the space.
The exhibition presents the artist’s first attempts at circumscribing and measuring space, such as 5 sistemi percettivi di un ambiente (1967) and Perimetro misura a studio stanza (1967) or the actions with which, between 1967 and 1968, he studied his own body, and those of the individuals close to him, in relation to the environment, documenting these experiments through photography. Instead, the urban surveys of a curving wall, a downhill street, and a step are explorations and measurements of public space on portions and architectural details of the city in which he lived at the time, Genoa, part of the photographic studies that Prini began in 1967. 
An important group, amongst the works on display, is the one with which, in 1995, Prini translated the above mentioned urban surveys into three-dimensional objects in wood or iron, on the occasion of the exhibition Fermi in Dogana at the Ancienne Douane in Strasbourg. These architectural volumes rendered the idea of the cast as an unrepresented dimension. 
Around 1969, Prini began a series of investigations on electronic devices such as recorders, camera’s, televisions and film camera’s, exploring their exhaustion from prolonged use. The exhibition presents Magnete/Proiezione Tv/ Programmazione di elementi a proiezione miniaturizzata con cancellazione alterna del quadro, Film TV and Magnete, 5 min., the latter of which explores the waning of the mechanisms present within an Exakta camera, photographed and later reproduced in the form of 18,915 off-set prints, printed and arranged in piles in the space. 
An ample body of works is represented by drawings on paper realized during the first half of the 1970s using an Olivetti 22 typewriter. These build upon mathematical formulas, architectural relations, and poetic annotations, which constitute surveys of space, time, light and existence. Lastly, the exhibition dedicates space to document how, starting in the 1980s, titles, captions, photographs, typefaces, dates, type and size of paper, become tools and materials for use and manipulation, through an ironic attitude and as a strategy of perceptive displacement.
Suspended between standard and variable, Prini’s research explores a series of key concepts to their most extreme limits. His works, just as the apparatuses exploited in making them, exist in function of the impossibility of being defined and stopped in their movement. What ensues is a natural resistance with respect to the mechanisms of the art system, its processes of circulation and commodification, all of which render Prini’s practice particularly relevant in the present day, pointing towards yet un-answered questions.
With respect to a society which distinguishes itself for its hyperproduction and consumption of images and objects, the contemporary relevance of Prini’s research consists in his constant questioning of the necessity to produce, in the coherence of a way of being and operating independently and elusively, capable of challenging the canons of historicization and instruments of interpretation of art, all in the name of art itself.

A heartfelt thanks to Timotea Austoni Prini

Acknowledgments
Grazia Austoni, Veronica Bellei, Sofia Biondi, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Roberto Borgonovo, Eva Brioschi, Anna Butticci, Giuseppe Cascetta, Sergio Casoli, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Giorgio Colombo, Emilio Corti, Antonio Dalle Nogare, Anna Daneri, Collezione La Gaia, Galleria Giorgio Persano, Galleria P420, Giuseppe Garrera, Michele Giustozzi, Giuseppe Graziosi, Paolo Icaro, Ovidio Jacorossi, Kienzle Art Foundation, Daniela Lancioni, Cornelia Lauf, Andrea e Mauro Magnanini, Famiglia Mazzoli, Massimo Minini, ML Fine Art Gallery, Museo del900, Giuliano Perezzani, Matteo Perini, Pietro Luigi e Valentina Pero, Galileo Persano, Mario Pieroni, Giulia Potaturo, Letizia Ragaglia, Lia Rumma, Fabio Sargentini, Giuliana e Tommaso Setari, Emilio Stabilini, Dora Stiefelmeier, Studio Bruno Tonini, Studio Celant, Franco Toselli

Curator: Luca Lo Pinto
Curatorial Coordinator: Matteo Binci
Production Coordinator: Lorena Stamo, Giulia Caruso, Anna Mostardi
Production Assistant: Livia Danese, Marco Lo Giudice
Research: Eloisa Magiera
Conservation: Natalia Gurgone, Brunella Graziani, Claudia Ranieri
Head of Press Office and Communication: Maddalena Bonicelli
Digital Content Editor: Nicoletta Graziano
Social Media Manager: Elena Fortunati
Web Manager / Digital Marketing: Andrea Pergola
Graphic Designer: Marco Campardo, Olivia Lynk
Art Handlers: Nomade Arte, Fabio Pennacchia, Matteo Pompili, Carlo Giannone, Stefano Silvia