Conversation | Raffaella della Olga on Typescripts at Clark Art Institute

A conversation with Italian-born, Paris-based artist Raffaella della Olga on her exhibition Typescripts, opening November 22 at the Clark Art Institute, with Clark curator and historian Robert Wiesenberger.

Raffaella della Olga (b. 1967, Bergamo; lives and works in Paris) uses modified typewriters and multicolor ink ribbons on various materials—including tracing paper, photo paper, and even sandpaper—to make unique artist’s books, each addressed to a different conceptual or technical problem. Seeking refuge from the wordiness of her former life as an attorney, and the chaos of shuttling between multiple languages, she modifies her machines to efface recognizable signs, producing instead an abstract language defined by form and color, texture and rhythm. Her manual interventions in the typewriter—smearing and dragging across the ink ribbon, inserting fabrics and carbon paper into the carriage—join the mechanical with the gestural and give her works extraordinary presence. Her bookworks are in the libraries of Bard College, the Clark, the Getty, Yale, and the Metropolitan Museum, among other major collections. Robert Wiesenberger, who has degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia, is curator of contemporary projects at the Clark Art Institute and lecturer in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, in Williamstown, MA. He has served as critic in the Yale School of Art’s MFA graphic design program, and his interests span modern and contemporary art, design, and architecture, with an emphasis on ecology and the more-than-human world.

The Typescripts exhibition catalog, designed and produced by Three Star Books in Paris and published by the Clark and Yale University Press, will be available for purchase and signing at the talk.

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