Artist’s book

Between 1976/77 the artists’ books were born, a privileged place for his research.

Monocopy books, accordion books, object books created in parallel with the various operating cycles. Gini is present in over 120 exhibitions in this sector.

In 1983, together with Fernanda Fedi, he founded the Artist’s Books Archive in Milan.

Artist’s books 1976-1982: praise the page, by A.Anelli.

With these first artist’s books, the “genre” adventure began for Gino Gini which would soon lead him in 1983 to the founding of the Laboratorio 66 Artist’s Books, an adventure he then widely shared with Fernanda Fedi.

In these books there is particular attention to copying techniques, above all in the use of spiral binding, with acetates and metal paper covers, with collages and in some cases with the use of xerographic reproduction. In these works there is a praise of the successful page with a refined use of symmetry and a rigorous management of solids and voids and black and white.

The interventions of color or color spectrums are targeted and constitute focal points of the work in which there is also an elegant chromatic balance.

Here begins the long journey of planning the project and hypotheses of value or use, of proliferations that can be declined in many possible worlds. Wide use is made of the different repetition and combination of the canonical images of the cycle.

Praise of the page also means giving priority to the browsable booklet and to the rise of the folding pages. This allows you to build page curtains, a sculpture that gains real space. The layout collects darts, ghosts, figures, kings, images, symbols of the pictorial works, which are subjected to the principle of multiplication in a continuous design variation.

The work of attestation also continues. In addition to the author’s signature, dates, numbers and numbering in rhizomatic and permuting cycles. 

The work-image in these continuous projections into the possible and into the virtual, seems to certify in the contemplative space a suspension and at the same time a tangle of perceptive temporalities, a framework and a space-time labyrinth that could have some bearing on the fictional metaphysics of Jorge Luis Borges and with his labyrinths and mirrors, but here the web of images is not that which the mirrors prolong «Prolongan este vano mundo incierto», but that of the persistence of images, of their power, rootedness and political desistance.

A number of pieces from this period is  available to purchase directly from the artist. Please enquire within to discuss your preferences and needs.