Pino Pascali – Roma 1968

"Pino Pascali – Roma 1968" brings to light for the first time in its entirety one of the last photo sessions capturing Pino Pascali, one of the faces of the 1960s Roman Piazza del Popolo art scene and a fundamental figure in the transition between Pop Art and Arte Povera in Italy. The series was shot in the spring of 1968 in Pascali’s studio in Rome, just a few months before his debut at the Venice Biennale and his premature death. The photographer was Marcello Colitti, a journalist, poet, photographer and Enrico Mattei’s right arm at Eni who had a fraternal bond with Pascali.

The spontaneous, playful and mostly unseen photographs, in fact, offer a precedently unseen insight into Pascali's life, allowing us to witness his creativity behind closed doors, from a backstage perspective.

However, they also work as a precious insight into the whole counterculture of late 1960s Italy, from the aesthetics to the dynamics that brought to the student boycott of the 1968 Biennale, where Pascali was deeply involved.

The publication comes in the shape of a square – a nod to the art catalogues of 1960s and 1970s Italian galleries – with an acetate cover which is a reference to Pascali’s work ‘32 Metri Quadrati di Mare Circa’ and with a metal ring binding that tributes Arte Povera and Pascali’s love for raw, everyday and working life materials. For the occasion a typeface tributing the lettering used for the XXXIV Venice Biennale was also created.

The publication is part of the archive researches on Italian youth and counterculture by Ragazzi di Strada and comes with introductory texts by Claudia Lodolo (daughter of Sandro, illustrator behind many Carosello animated adverts and Pascali’s collaborator at Lodolo Film), Flavia Colitti (daughter of photographer Marcello) and curator Lorenzo Ottone.

Released on 20/11/2021