Claudio Parmiggiani was born in 1943, just before Italy entered a postwar period of profound economic crisis. In the realm of figurative art, too, things were dissolving. At 19, Parmiggiani began showing his art publicly. He was involved in literature and in books as art. In 1970, he created the first of many Delocazioni (displacements), which used smoke and soot to form ghostly impressions of bottles, books, and body parts. These works meditate on absence and memory. They search for “an image, object or assemblage that transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universal, existential truth.” They capture a certain nothingness. This exhibition presents Parmiggiani’s groundbreaking series alongside works from the last 50 years of his career. —Elena Clavarino