Claudio Parmiggiani

As a teenager, Parmiggiani (born 1943) worked as an assistant to the great Italian still life painter Giorgio Morandi, and though Parmiggiani is a conceptualist, he evidently assimilated some of the master’s affinity for the ephemeral. Parmiggiani began the works here, for example, by subjecting plain white panels mounted with various objects—bottles, violins, classical figurative sculptures—to smoke and soot produced by a controlled fire in the studio. The items were then removed to reveal the ghostly shadows presented here.