Giorgio Di Domenico

WINTER-SPRING 2023

Giorgio Di Domenico is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His doctoral research focuses on the reception of Surrealism in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. He aims to demonstrate how central Surrealism has been to postwar Italian artists, including those without official or overt ties to the movement. He bases his research on visual analysis, framed within a broader context of cultural studies and archival-based research.

He attended the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa for his BA and MA, defending theses on Jannis Kounellis’s Rose Paintings and the Italian artists’ magazine La Città di Riga, to which he also devoted a forthcoming monograph. He interned at La Galleria Nazionale in Rome and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. In spring 2022, he was a visiting student at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University. His publications include essays on the work of Jannis Kounellis (Studi di Memofonte, 2018; Paragone, 2022), the practice of Alberto Burri in the 1970s (Annali della Scuola Normale, 2021), and the relationship between Burri and Robert Rauschenberg in 1950s New York (Prospettiva, 2022). More recently, Giorgio started to engage in contemporary art criticism: he occasionally writes in Antinomie and Flash Art.

His research project as a CIMA fellow will combine various approaches to the relationships between Surrealism and advertising, analyzed from an Italian perspective. His focus will be the reception of Surrealist imagery by Italian advertising graphics from the 1930s to the 1970s. A second research theme will be the circulation of the advertising production of Surrealist artists in Italy, with specific insights into the activity of Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico. Finally, the last part of his research will focus on the Surrealist influence on Mimmo Rotella’s oeuvre.