Publication
Guglielmo Castelli
Sweet Baby Motel

Published on the occasion of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Guglielmo Castelli: Sweet Baby Motel is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s painting and sculpture. The publication conducts a wide-ranging investigation into the artist’s ethereal poetics, including newly commissioned essays. Art historian and critic Lillian Davies explores the enigmatic depths of Castelli’s painting practice and curator Sarah Crowe pays particular attention to the artist’s weightless, boneless and genderless figures. Francesco Manacorda interviews the artist on his scenographic, filmic approach. 

Guglielmo Castelli developed a new corpus of works for the exhibitions in Turin and Vienna that spans painting, collage and sculpture, and culminates in a selection of his sketchbooks. Facilitating an extremely deep understanding of the process and of the most intimate aspects of Castelli’s practice, these sketchbooks are invaluable repositories of creative trajectories, containing references from different places and times, which are then carefully selected by the artist to flow into his work.

The sketchbooks and the artistic process they embody have guided the temporal structure and artistic intimacy of the publication. Castelli constellates myriad materials within them – from preliminary drawings and notes to poetry excerpts and fabric cutoffs – as conceptual inspiration for bodies of work that he conceives as fully fledged exhibitions. In the publication, examples of these collaged fields of associations preface documentation of individual exhibitions and their groups of work, thus bringing the artist’s practice full circle.

The publication is available in a regular version and as a limited edition signed by Guglielmo Castelli (20 copies).

Editors: Michelle Cotton, Francesco Manacorda

Texts by: Sarah Crowe, Lillian Davies, Francesco Manacorda

24 x 30 cm, 256 pages

Design: Lorenzo Mason Studio

ISBN: 979-12-80579-90-4

Published by: Lenz; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin and Kunsthalle Wien – Stadt Wien Kunst GmbH