Quaderni d'arte italiana

Quaderni d’arte italiana is a quarterly journal that aims at providing a space for investigation and reflection on 21st-century Italian art and its relations with the various Italian and international cultural and socio-political scenes. The journal is published upon the 95th anniversary of the Quadriennale di Roma (1927-2022) with the contribution of the Taskforce for the Valorisation of National Anniversaries and the Participation of the New Generations, at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. 

The journal, which is published by Treccani and is available in Italian and English, adopts an analytical approach that seeks to problematise contemporary creation by conceiving it as a privileged tool for reading the present.

The magazine’s articles are published weekly and free of charge in this section and on the digital platform quaderni.online.

The editor-in-chief of the magazine is Gian Maria Tosatti. The editorial board is composed of: Nicolas Ballario, Francesca Guerisoli, Nicolas Martino, Attilio Scarpellini and Andrea Viliani.

The production of the magazine sees the involvement of the curators who collaborate in the various activities of the Quadriennale and external authors.

#community, n. 05, march 2023

We are at the end of a winter in which the figure of the artist has been perceived as alone, independent of the collective intelligence that has always been the form in which art has developed, from the earliest times to the most recent. Art draws vital energies from the encounter of different sensibilities and from the generous spirit in which great insights are shared — from the physical spaces of the ateliers to the literary spaces of manifestoes.

Today, shared studios and some artist-run spaces are the places where art once again becomes a collective affair, a dialogue and no longer a series of monologues. Indeed, they do so with the existential delicacy which is characteristic of the younger generation.

#identity, n. 04, december 2022

Identity, ontology, poetics. These themes overlap in contemporary ethical and aesthetic reflection, in the time of what an important book by Luciano Floridi termed ‘the fourth revolution’. This means that the digital is emerging no longer as a technology, but as a dimension of politics and of existence itself. This issue of Quaderni d’arte italiana intends to take a journey suspended between two worlds – the universe, and the metaverse – and observe how humanity’s oscillation between these two planes has been registered in artists’ as well as some philosophers’ analyses.

#history, n. 03, september 2022

Writing History is an act that presupposes a temporal wholeness. The present is History and the future towards which it tends is also History. The production of documents must start out from this awareness. For that to be possible, it is neces- sary to have a method, but also the courage not to run away from open horizons, and to be able to look them in the eye, wrenching from them the truth that we can read within them.

#popular, n. 02, june 2022

In this issue of the journal, we have tried to map out some boundaries that frame the concept of the “popular”, which we are interested in investigating within an interpretative grid that follows the evolution of Western civilisation from its origins. This small stratigraphic analysis shows — beneath the walls that constitute the vast edifice of the current idea of the popular — the underlying Roman walls, submerged like roots, and, beneath them, the even more ancient Greek walls.

#italy, n. 01, march 2022

The first issue of Quaderni d’arte italiana proposes to reconnect the narrative of contemporary Italian art to an art history that has gone global. Doubtless, this has come with some delay – and perhaps there has been a certain difficulty in knowing how to tell our story. But, upon closer inspection, clear lines of identity do emerge. There is also, then, a further question driving this issue: what forces can Italy really count on, in the world of present-day art?

Open door

the magazine accepts the submission of critical essays on 21st-century Italian art by young critics aged under 35 and reserves the right to consider them for publication.