Filippo Bosco

Filippo Bosco received his PhD in Cultures and Societies of Contemporary Europe from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, in 2024, with a dissertation on Italian conceptual art and drawing in the 1970s. He has held various research positions in Germany and the United States, including fellowships at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, and at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York; and a direct-exchange scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

His interests and publications include 20th century Italian art and criticism; queer theory and international painting; and contemporary drawing. He recently contributed to various exhibition catalogues (Penone, Paris, 2022; Fratino, Prato, 2024) and to the ‘Drawing’ issue of The Burlington Contemporary (2023). He collaborated with the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM) in Turin, where he co-curated an exhibition on Giacomo Balla, and the Castello di Rivoli, where he contributed to the catalogue of the Cerruti Collection (2021). A book about Giuseppe Penone’s early practice is in preparation.

The post-medium condition of Western contemporary art problematizes the definition of ‘drawing’ as the private practice of ideation, resisting paradigms of paternity (Vasari), ‘primacy’, or identity of the medium. Bosco will frame contemporary drawing as a marginal and critical function in respect to practices afferent to installation art, conceptual art, performance, video, and digital art. Scale is a generative concept for a material-based, theoretical framework to approach the vast corpora of sketches, studies, plans, and notes that challenge critical accounts as well as departmental classification in museums and archives.

Marginality is a conceptual alternative to enduring clichés such as drawing=sincerity=subjectivity, and at the same time it opposes hyperscalability (or the virtual non-scaled quality of artworks) in favour of critical models of scalar-specific reduction, with qualitative and political implications (on axes of friction, figurability, fidelity). Selecting marginal and transnational case studies in a timeframe spanning from the 1960s to the present, the research will also articulate a dialogue with non-artistic forms of drawn ideation, including critical research itself.