Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924) lives and works in Rome and Paris. He used, since the end of the Fifties, different media: painting, cinema, installation, object, sculpture, and performative practices. In the early Sixties in Milan Baruchello met and befriended Marcel Duchamp, who will become his landmark. In 1962 he took part in the iconic group show The New Realists, curated by Sidney Janis in New York. Gianfranco Baruchello spent most of the Sixties between New York, where he counted John Cage as a friend, and Paris where he took part in the revolts of 1968 with friends Felix Guattari, Alain Jouffroy, Jean François Lyotard, and Jean Jacques Lebel. In the Seventies after a decade of profitably engaging with the Parisian and New York art scenes, first hand witnessing and participating in the rise of Pop Art, Baruchello decided to move on. Not wanting to abide to the fashions of the moment, he chose to characterise himself as an outsider, moving to the Roman countryside in 1973. The artist founded the farm Agricola Cornelia S.p.A, an inedited experiment through art and agriculture, through politics and poetics. Here he found the perfect external location for his quest for the understanding of the interior: the refusal to conform becoming a statement that supports his aim to shape a depiction and understanding of the works of the human mind. In the late 1970s he took part in two major exhibitions: he shows at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and at Documenta in Kassel in 1977. During the 1980s and 1990s he concentrates on his work and on the land of the Agricola Cornelia, which in 1998, with Carla Subrizi, he transformed in the Fondazione Baruchello: a foundation dedicated to contemporary art and offering spaces for artists to create work. Baruchello’s works are part of Museum Collections around the world: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and MAXXI (Rome), MoMA and Guggenheim Museum (New York), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia) and also Barcelona, Munich, Hamburg, London, and Paris. In recent years he participated at Documenta (2012), the Venice Biennale (2013). Among recent solo exhibitions: Rome (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, 2011), Hamburg and Karlsruhe (Deichtorhallen and ZKM / Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, 2014), Milan (Triennale, 2015), London (Raven Row, 2017), Nizza (Villa Arson, 2018), and Rovereto (Mart, 2018). In 2020 Treccani published Psicoeneclopedia possibile, a monumental work that challenges the very concept of encyclopedia.