photo Thimothy Greenfield-Sanders

Art critic, curator, and essayist, Demetrio Paparoni was born in Siracusa, Italy, in 1954 and currently lives in Milan. In 1983 he founded the contemporary art magazine Tema Celeste and the publishing house bearing the same name, which he managed until 2000. In 1981 he received a temporary faculty appointment to teach contemporary art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 1996 to 1998 he taught History of Contemporary Art in the Department of Architecture at the University of Catania (at its satellite campus in Siracusa). He taught History of Modern Art in the same department between 2003 and 2008.

In 1996 he collaborated with the Fundación Reina Sofía de Madrid on the exhibit Nuevas Abstracciones at the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid and at the Galería de Arte Moderno in Barcelona. That same year he became a promoter for the launching of Sicily’s first Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea in Siracusa, of which he was the director until 1998.

In 1997 he was invited by the Secreteria de Cultura della Presidencia de la Nacion Uruguaiana  to hold a conference on Abstract Art in the Nineties at Montevideo, held at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. In the same year, he was invited by the Secreteria de Cultura della Presidencia de la Nacion Argentina to represent Italy (together with Gianni Vattimo) at the International Meetings of Critic in Buenos Aires, held at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. In 2007 he curated Mentalgrafie/Viaggio nell'arte contemporanea italiana in Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, with a mandate of the Italian Culture Institute in Tel Aviv and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the aegis of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. It was the greatest exhibition on Italian art so far organized in the Middle East. In 2008, he curated the exhibition on Spanish Art España 1957-2007 in Palermo, with a mandate of Instituto Cervantes in Madrid and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the aegis of the Spanish Ministry of Culture. It was one of the greatest exhibitions of Spanish art held outside Spain in the last decades. In 2013, he took part in the video “Anish Kapoor and friends perform Gangnam Style”, for Ai Weiwei. In 2017, he curated the Pavilion of the Armenian Republic at Biennale in Venice. In 2018, his book Il bello, il buono e il cattivo was translated into Armenian. In the same year he received the Gold Medal from the Ministry of Culture of the Armenian Republic.

Paparoni has created numerous TV documentaries for Rai Educational channel.