Santiago Mauri
In the twin roles of President of Studio Fabio Mauri – Associazione per l’Arte L’Esperimento del Mondo and the artist’s nephew, it gives me great pleasure to present this catalogue raisonné. This moment marks the culmination of a journey that one might say goes back at least a century. In 1994, I remember Fabio presenting his autobiography, Preistoria come storia (Prehistory as History), at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome during the major Mauri retrospective held there. The autobiography intertwined the underlying reasons behind his works with the stories of our ancestors. Josephine Baker, Buffalo Bill, Mussolini, Luigi Pirandello and Mickey Mouse all featured in this brilliant text. It was as if Fabio’s ‘prehistory’ was a secret mine for his inexhaustible artistic inspiration; as if his life, his works and actions were expressions of a period of history that began well before he was born.
A few years later, Fabio again paid homage to our family’s history at the French Academy – Villa Medici in Rome with his Quadreria installation, displaying the family sofa in his great grandfather Roberto Bompiani’s studio. A metal plaque placed on the backrest listed the names of all the famous folk who had sat on it: a long list running from Gabriele D’Annunzio to Andy Warhol, tracing the trajectory of twentieth-century Italian cultural history. An inscription on the wall introduced the work with the phrase ‘Non ero nuovo’ (Nothing new), once again emphasising the line of continuity.
When Fabio died in 2009 to join the ranks of these illustrious figures, his younger brother, my father Achille, took on the mantle of preserving his memory until he passed away in 2023. Now that the artist’s siblings’ generation has followed Fabio, we nephews have the burden and honour of passing on the depth and breadth of his work. We pursue this task not just as a private matter but as a venture of cultural, historical and international importance.
I have always been struck by how, while being rooted in history, Fabio’s vision was consistently ahead of its time. Whenever I walked into my father Achille’s house and saw his Sinatra work hanging on the living room wall, I marvelled at how, in 1964, Fabio could have conceived a vertical screen with the same proportions as an iPhone. No other late-50s artist had so lucidly elaborated the impact that screens would have on our global media society.
Fabio’s close friendships with intellectuals Pier Paolo Pasolini, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia and Cesare Zavattini, with whom he forged friendships and worked while directing the Roman office of beloved ‘Uncle Val; Bompiani’s publishing house, put him at the heart of the most avant-garde cultural debate of that period.
His always-lively thinking and frenetic succession of ideas – which he barely managed to jot down in his diaries – is today preserved in the archive in Rome. Ho pensato tutto (I Thought of Everything) is the title of a unique artist’s book that Fabio created in 1972, in which he precociously admitted that he was unable to settle in historiographically useful times, focusing as ever more on research than capitalising on its results. Rather than being an advantage to him, this precocity and intellectual depth all too often resulted in the art world eschewing him.
Fabio was as visionary with his 60s screens and installations, a unique take on Pop, as he was incisive in addressing the themes of ideology, manipulation and memory. He was one of the first artists in Italy to put the great repressed issue of the boom years – Nazi-fascism – at the centre of artistic debate. He did so by courageously trawling back through the personal trauma he’d experienced during the war years: lost friends, bodies exploited and violated in concentration camps, fear of bombings, hunger, psychiatric hospitals, mystical visions, God, evil, the Apocalypse ... not just mental but physical memories, still imprinted on the body. Perhaps for this reason, he represented these memories through actions that earned him the epithet of Italy’s performance pioneer: Che cosa èil fascism (What is Fascism),Ebrea (Hebrew), and Ideologia e natura (Ideology and Nature) rightly became part of Italian performance’s classic repertoire.
Another thing that has always struck me is that Fabio never stopped experimenting, not even after being acknowledged as a master artist. Maintaining strong coherence with his many themes, he continued incorporating new stylistic approaches and expressive forms into his works. For a large 2007 installation at Hangar Bicocca in Milan, he repurposed his research into projections – begun in the 1970s with 16 mm films – as a digital, immersive and technological environment, a futuristic and dystopian world populated by projections, lights, sounds and a magnificent performance by Luigi Lo Cascio, who recited the Revelation to Saint John.
For several years, Fabio had a studio where he worked with a group of assistants, young artists, former students from the Academy at L’Aquila with whom, ever focused on seeking out new forms, ideas and social customs, he maintained an ongoing conversation, with the participants learning from one another. Significantly, he named his association L’esperimento del mondo (The Experiment of the World). Aided by his assistants, Fabio worked until the very last day of his life. He passed away while preparing his installation for the 13th edition of dOCUMENTA in Kassel, and just days before the opening of his final exhibition, titled (significantly) ‘Etc’.
My father, Achille, was not only Fabio’s younger brother but his great life companion. From the 1960s, Achille was with Fabio at his exhibitions. As he loved to say that he was Fabio’s first collector, publisher and friend, there for him in hard times right to the end. When Fabio died, Achille became the hub around whom Fabio’s large family united. Taking that ‘etcetera’ quite literally, Achille was keen to keep looking ahead. He accomplished this with the help of that same group of assistants – Marcella, Claudio, Ivan, Dora and Sandro – who had supported Fabio in the studio for years. Achille also created the scientific committee, which today includes Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as president, Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Caroline Bourgeois, Laura Cherubini, and Andrea Viliani.
The studio was transformed into an archive, an estate dedicated to managing Fabio’s legacy, an important centre for promoting the artist and his research. This marked the start of extensive work to catalogue, archive and monitor Fabio’s artworks, researching and reconstructing lesser-known works, and preserving and disseminating his ideas – meticulous daily work that has gone hand in hand with faithfully passing on Fabio’s work to posterity.
The catalogue raisonné is the outcome of many years’ work spent structuring a shared, organised, scientific and dialectical memory. Achille hired Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a consummate professional and Fabio’s companion on this journey – who was the curator of the retrospective at the National Gallery in Rome as well as the Academy of France-Villa Medici – to provide scientific oversight of this ambitious project that is finally seeing the light of day. I prefer not to say, ‘nearing the end’, because as Fabio taught us, we have merely reached ‘etcetera’.
Knowing that research and cartographic work never actually come to an end, and history is anything but static, we publish this catalogue online to mark the centenary of Fabio’s birth, as a preparatory and complementary tool to the printed version (scheduled for release in 2026). Despite being part of a family of esteemed publishers, despite our deep and innate appreciation of printed media, we are well aware of the vast potential that digital platforms have when it comes to capturing the multifaceted nature of an artist’s work – particularly an artist like Fabio – who frequently worked with moving images, sounds, bodies and actions.
We hope that this catalogue will be a significant reference for researchers, museums and institutions, enthusiasts and collectors who, now or in the future, engage with Fabio Mauri’s work.
I wish to express my gratitude to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Sara Codutti, in charge of the coordination and research, for their invaluable contributions. We also thank advisory committee members, Studio Mauri, and indeed everyone who, as we do, recognises the greatness of Fabio’s oeuvre and character.
