Here is a book that might be of interest to some of you Italian contemporary art fans... the gallery I interned for in Milan this summer reps. this artist, and the book has been on the Mondadori bestseller list for quite some time. I will post the Italian version on the appropriate thread.
Enjoy!
MANUALE DELLA FIGURA UMANA (Manual of the Human Figure)
By: Marta Dell’Angelo
Edizione Gli Ori, 2007
Language: Italian
180 pages
Dimension: 15 x 20 cm
Price: € 22
A handful of images and words that we unconsciously bring back and through casual action, how to make order on the proper desktop and the right PC, revives a memory and brings back to mind reminders that we have never had. But everything in time is always below our eyes and comprises a large part of our daily needs. This is the precursor that Marta Dell’Angelo accomplishes in the creation of an open work. The form the artist chooses is a manual, maintaining the distance from a more classical structure of the human figure, which used to be close to those found in the Academy of Fine Arts. Of this traditional method comes well kept, a division in chapters (body, self-portrait, head, high and low art, the interconnection of the form), during which its graphic speed is a nostalgic homage to reviews in the various genres of the 1950s. She understands and generates a juxtaposed effect between the styles of the pages and the innovation of contents. This is a worth added without any explanation and any didactic comments.
The manual is conceived and devised through subsequent readings of the material accumulated, through which the red line catches a glimpse of artistic alteration and the biography of the author. A collage of works, images, words, text (between the authors Woody Allen, Sartre, Bukowski, Pasolini), fragments, photographs, points, newspaper press clippings and images stolen from the internet - the artist has created links and associations like a joint game, with elements that attract the direct and spontaneous, constituting a new idea for the manual. An experience like this can approach anyone and this book is a demonstration of how a[n] absolutely personal and subjective experience can become both applicable and universally comprehensible.
These original images leave space to new places composed of heterogeneous elements that the artist seizes, of proper reality and that from which it surrounds. She appropriates, therefore, points that she takes from other sources and with this deconstruction, sets such data and recomposes the subject, giving it a diverse version in regard to implementing the previous versions along with it. So, the reality of daily needs happens that the reader’s eye assists to alternate him/herself to the images of the bodily re-proposals and describes diversely what is accustomed to them by its means of communication (internet, cinema, television, publicity, printed pages, photography and art).
The addressee then becomes an active part of remodeling, which signifies the images that no predefined order obligates to ensure, but not in a direct or didactic fashion: it is so that these shortened abstracts of books that are habitually read by the author associates in a natural manner with juxtaposed images, arriving from diverse fonts, designing a new, informative version of the human body.
Info:
info@lecasedarte.com http://www.gliori.it/scheda_libro.php?id=306 www.gliori.it
Tel: 00 39 057 423290
Fax: 00 39 055 8876324
Original Text (Italian) by : Marta Tosi
Translation (English) by: Laura Kuah
MANUALE DELLA FIGURA UMANA (Manual of the Human Figure) 
Linear Mode
