Paolo Curti & Co. Gallery will start the year 2000 with an exhibition by the American artist Mike Bidlo.
Bidlo jumped into contemporary art scene at the beginning of the `80s at the East Village. He belongs, together with Sherry Levine and some other artists, to the so called appropriationism, or, as he likes to define himself, he is an "absorptioner of the XXth century masterpieces", such as paintings and sculptures of artists like Picasso, Leger, Brancusi, Man Ray and others.

In this show, for the first time in Italy, after having been seen in Zurich at Bruno Bishofberger gallery and in New York at Tony Shafrazi gallery, more than one thousand work will be exhibited, in which Bidlo refers to one of the biggest masterpieces of the century: "Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp. In the past five years Mike Bidlo has concentrated his artistic energies on making a large number of drawings, each one different from the other, with Duchamp's masterpiece as their subject, using a multitude of brushes, pencils and media. In the imperturbable repetition and variation, there is a spiritual, Zen-like quality.

The conceptual character of Bidlo's art of appropriation is clear. It is with affection and devotion that he now finds a place of honor for Duchamp's urinal, which was rejected at the Society of Independent Artists in New York in February 1917. With this work Bidlo explores certain trains of thought and makes a step on: Duchamp had appropriated a real pissoir; Bidlo brings it back to fine art using paper, brushes and colours, challenging the conception of originality.
In his installation for the 1997 reopening of P.S.1. in New York, Bidlo decorated the second-floor bathroom with a wallpaper based on his "Fountain Drawings".

This exhibition has been selected in the annual review of the famous magazine Artforum as one of the more interesting shows in 1998 by three of the five American critics who made the selection. About this work the volume "Fountain Drawings" has been edited for the two previous shows.