Gino De Dominicis: Works from the Collection of Guntis Brands

Gino de Dominicis (1947 – 1998) was an artist of eccentric and mysterious sensibility. He is often described as an isolated case in the Italian art context: an artist who turned his back on the logic of groups and movements in favour of a solitary artistic creation. Profoundly moved by the post-Duchampian era, early in his career he produced provocative installations that criticised conceptual art while influencing its development. His commitment, however, was to figuration and to an art that transcended eras: ‘drawings, painting and sculpture’, he insisted’, ‘are not traditional but original forms of expression, thus also belong to the future’.

His work is characterised by its interest in the principles of alchemy and metamorphosis, impossible transformations that express immortality. There is a clear disinterest in the iconography of his recent predecessors and his contemporaries. Instead, De Dominicis laid claim to a new family of images influenced by ancient civilizations, from Sumerian culture to the demigod Gilgamesh and the nymph Urvasi, using mythology as a form of storytelling to propose alternative approaches to time. His work is both abstractive and figurative, and neither at the same time.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Gino De Dominicis: Works from the Collection of Guntis Brands, that was held by Luxembourg & Dayan, London, in 2017, this book is focused on Gino De Dominicis’ work as a painter. Through essays by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Flavia Frigeri, and a poem by Daniel Buren,  the mysterious figure of Gino De Dominicis begins to unveil, offering an insight to one of the most enigmatic artists of the twentieth century.