Galerie Isy Brachot, Paris Collection Gustav Stein, Honrath Galerie Lilo Schulz-Siemens, Dusseldorf Private Collection, Paris Private Collection, France
Exhibited
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Domenico Gnoli, December 3 - December 27, 1969 Paris, Galerie Isy Brachot, Domenico Gnoli, 1978 New York, Dickinson Gallery, WHITE, November 4 - December 10, 2013
Literature
Domenico Gnoli, exh. cat., Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1969, no. 26 (illustrated) L. Carluccio, Domenico Gnoli, New York: Overlook Press, 1974, p. 131 (illustrated) V. Sgarbi, Domenico Gnoli, Milan: Ricci Editore, 1983, p.155 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
Details were Domenico Gnoli’s main obsession and the focus of his most complete achievements as a painter. In Shirt Collar Size 14 ½ the artist manages to uncover a fresh and original component of the painted medium with a sculptural dimension similar to Baroque artist Lorenzo Bernini’s perfection of the details in his marble masterpieces. In this one painting, Gnoli combines the multiple conceptual informants of painting and sculpture, these “radically different” media, while never diluting one or the other, nor conflating the two. The collar is now a fragment of the whole of the shirt, reminiscent of that which graces the back of Benjamin Franklin’s marble portrait by Jean Antoine Houdon. The canvas, with its sandy and grainy texture, is like the heavily worked surface of a Robert Ryman canvas while the measure of the collar assumes a quasi-conceptual dimension like the date in an On Kawara painting or one of the numbers in Mario Merz’s Fibonacci series. The white shirt, which was most probably residing ironed and well-folded in a drawer of his closet, or on a shelf at a department store, enlarged and magnified as it is on the canvas, becomes a universal image freed from any possible limiting narrative. It reflects both fashion and culture. It represents both purity and elegance. It’s rigorous and humble. It is a Symbol that Gnoli has been able to create within the natural and conventional space of a painting.
