Pagine sperimentali: il libro d’artista tra anni Sessanta e Settanta nella stamperia d’arte di Giorgio Upiglio a Milano

The art print shop of Giorgio Upiglio, which officially opens in 1962 at the headquarters in via Fara 9, was born in Milan in the fervent post-war climate in which new trends are delineated both in a more experimental sense and in the context of the renewal of painting, between "Lombard naturalism" and "informal sign-gestural". The presence of Wols and Pollock in Milan - respectively in the Milione gallery in April 1949 and at the Naviglio gallery in October 1950 - but also the return of Lucio Fontana from Argentina do not go unnoticed and suggest to the young artists new experiments on the surface of the canvas, which becomes a real "field" of action. Even the field of art graphics is not immune to such experimental impetus. In Giorgio Upiglio's studio many artists, frequenters of the Jamaica Bar and some historical galleries such as the Galleria del Naviglio, Il Milione or L'Annunciata and literati, in the Sixties find a meeting place where they can test these new languages and techniques, but also dialogue of art and politics, of the phenomena of a society then all tending to rebirth, to development, crossed by the economic miracle and at the same time full of contradictions. The precious sheets and in particular the artist's books that come out of the printing press do not reproduce only images, but constitute real experimental objects, in which the image is associated with the word and the most unusual materials. In particular, the artist's book becomes a form of open dialogue between the most material component of objectivity and of the realization tools and the immaterial component of the sign and the word: they are a meeting place for figurative artists and writers, such as the one between Giovanni Patani and Dino Buzzati or Wifredo Lam and René Char. The autograph documents in the Giorgio Upiglio Fund of the Archivio del Moderno in Mendrisio (CH) are the precious source of a possible reconstruction of this activity between the 1960s and the 1970s, not yet sufficiently detailed by the art critic.