Reading the Art World: Michele Robecchi, Phaidon
Since 2012, Michele Robecchi has served as Commissioning Editor of Phaidon’s “Contemporary Artist Series” — a series of monographs that profile and contextualize leading artists of our time. In 2020, Phaidon celebrated the 25th anniversary of this now iconic series of artist monographs which bring together leading artists of our times with some of the world’s most influential authors and curators to collaborate on these artist books. Michele has overseen the editing and publication of over 35 monographs for the series including the work of Mark Bradford, Yayoi Kusama, Jonas Wood, Adam Pendleton, and most recently, Cecily Brown. In this podcast, Robecchi talks about how his extensive curatorial work and expertise in working with contemporary artists informs his writing and his work on this series for Phaidon.
I chose the Phaidon Contemporary Artists books for the Reading the Art World podcast because I find that they consistently provide insightful perspectives on contemporary artists and their work written not only by art historians and critics but philosophers, novelists, cultural theorists.
I appreciate these books because the artist’s voice is always captured and reflected in the text and of course in the extensive and beautifully reproduced illustrations. I found that the books I’ve read from the series— on Gormley, Marina Abromovic, Ai Weiwei, Mark Bradford and so many others—allow me to take a ‘deeper dive’ into the artist that adds to my engagement with their work.
Born and raised in Italy, Michele Robecchi studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan where he received an MA in Curating. Robecchi has organized exhibitions in Berlin, Geneva, London, Milan, Paris and Zurich. For the last five years he has served on the selection committee for the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Learn more about Reading the Art World here.