VENICE—“The show is about a civilization of contemporary artists that has been kind of buried,” the independent Italian curator Francesco Bonami says of “Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition & Revolution, 1968–2008,” running at the Palazzo Grassi from September 27 through January 11, 2009. “Italy has been amazingly rich in talent—forgotten and abandoned talents, who sometimes self-destructed because the country is lacking in exhibition spaces.” In collaboration with Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, Bonami is focusing on 235 works, many privately held, by 106 Italian artists. Alongside art by names like Maurizio Cattelan and Francesco Clemente, there are pieces by relative unknowns, such as Renato Guttuso’s fantastical 1972 Funeral of (Palmiro) Togliatti. (Togliatti was the Italian Communist Party leader from 1927 to 1964.) “Italics” is Chicago-bound in 2009.

"Well Punctuated" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.