Paolo Scheggi

This book reflects on Italian avant-garde artist Paolo Scheggi’s (1940–71) short but influential career, which was intensely interdisciplinary and research-based, helping to define him as a pioneer of several contemporary art movements.

This catalogue raisonné on the work of Paolo Scheggi is the most complete publication to date on the artist and is an indispensable tool to understanding and investigating his entire oeuvre. The outcome of painstaking study and attentive collecting of materials like documents, photos, writings, and period publications (mostly never seen before), this catalog is edited by Luca Massimo Barbero along with the Associazione Paolo Scheggi, with a fundamental contribution by Franca Scheggi Dall’Acqua. Finally investigated in its fundamental forms, the art output of Paolo Scheggi (Settignano, Florence, 1940–Rome, 1971) is analyzed in sections that illustrate his lively and incessant interdisciplinary research, by presenting over 600 works with a detailed cataloging of his environmental works, maquettes, and performances. In contact with international groups and movements, Paolo Scheggi took part in important exhibitions, in Paris, Buenos Aires, New York, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Zagreb, until his untimely death in 1971.

Luca Massimo Barbero is Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and Director of the Istituto di Storia dell’Arte at the Fondazione G. Cini, also in Venice.

This volume celebrates the work of the Italian artist Paolo Scheggi during the 1960s: the seminal and crucial creative decade prior to his untimely death in 1971 at the age of thirty-one. A selection of his paintings, including some unpublished canvases from private collections, reaffirms the role played by Scheggi in the development of modern art in Italy.

Francesca Pola is a historian and critic of contemporary art as well as an independent curator and art journalist.