This event is the inaugural lecture of the 2018–19 program of the Rome Art History Network.

The Italian artist Paolo Gioli (born in 1942), who studied painting and the nude at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice, has long been preoccupied with the human body. Like his experimental films, which establish “an essential analogy between celluloid and skin as the sensitive interface between the self and the outside world,” Gioli’s Polaroid transfers use the body and its fragments as a means to interrogate photography’s history and theoretical foundations, as well as its dialogue with cinema, printmaking, sculpture, and painting.

Gioli was among the first artists to master Polaroid transfers following the introduction of SX-70 instant film in 1972. Since then, he has produced a wide range of formally complex works with the gelatin and dye layers of Polaroid emulsion. Using handmade pinhole cameras and alternative paper and silk supports, Gioli marries the most elemental procedures of early photography to a sophisticated use of the one-step film created by Edwin Land, cofounder of the Polaroid Corporation.

This talk offers a preview of the themes engaged by the exhibition of the same name opening at the American Academy in Rome on October 11. Both the talk and the exhibition explore the artist’s technical virtuosity with the Polaroid medium as a platform for profound meditations upon the human form and the fractured body politic.

Peter Benson Miller is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome.

The lecture will be held in English.