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.

This project examines small and fragmentary materials on paper from two collections donated to the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett by Egidio Marzona, Paul Maenz, and Gerd de Vries. Quite exceptionally, they preserved sketches, notes, scrapbooks, letters, postcards, even scribbles on napkins and coasters, made by postwar international artists in the context of the activities of private galleries in Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s. Such materials represent a marginal category in art history and a form of auto-reduction of artistic authorship and practice. They never accessed the status of work of art, they were archived in the ‘Maschinenraum’ of the gallery and remained entirely private – and yet, social. In fact, their random and spontaneous execution reflects forms of sociality, from professional collaboration to personal friendship, between individuals, gallerists, and artists.

Scrapbooks from the Engine Room explores how this paper materials challenge the boundaries of art history by techniques of microanalysis and anthropological perspectives. Each little piece of paper can’t be read without its context, and evokes specific moments of encounters or stages in the planning of a work or an exhibition. With almost no formal development, the notes are often hermetic and drastically limit their interpretation. The concept of marginality guides the analysis in order to resist fetishization and account for the liminal function of paper in creating social relations.

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.