This monograph aims to highlight the very diverse features and extraordinary richness of Arte Povera painter Giorgio Griffa. With a selection of the artist's writings and comprehensive chronology.
“Giorgio Griffa is one of the least-known Turin-born artists of the Arte Povera generation. Another precious ‘secret' that the city of Turin, discreet and haughty as ever, has managed to keep under wraps—in this case for almost half a century. From the immediate post-war period, a singular group of young artists in the city helped write the history of European art in the second half of the twentieth-century. Together with now universally acclaimed figures, such as
Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone,
Giulio Paolini,
Giovanni Anselmo,
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio, and Mario and Marisa Merz, there were also other leading artists in Turin, who have only recently begun to receive the international attention they deserve. Here I am thinking of the likes of
Piero Gilardi,
Gianni Piacentino, Carol Rama,
Salvo, and Aldo Mondino, but also of the eccentric and eclectic
Carlo Mollino. Griffa was one of the most discreet and isolated in this group of young people who revolved around Sperone's gallery. He immediately showed an exclusive interest in painting, while his companions mainly moved out towards sculpture and installation from the mid-sixties.”
Andrea BelliniIn 1968, Giorgio Griffa (born 1936 in Turin) abandoned figurative painting in favor of a format of abstract painting that still characterizes his work to this day. Painting with acrylic on raw un-stretched canvas, burlap and linen, Griffa's works are nailed directly to the wall along their top edge. When not exhibited, the works are folded and stacked, resulting creases that create an underlying grid for his compositions. In keeping with his idea that painting is “constant and never finished”, many of his works display a deliberate end-point that has been described as “stopping a thought mid-sentence.” Despite early associations with movements such as
Arte Povera and
Minimalism, Giorgio Griffa's work was not exhibited in the United States for 40 years after his first solo exhibition in New York at Ileana Sonnabend's gallery. In 2012, Giorgio Griffa had a solo exhibition, Fragments 1968 - 2012 at Casey Kaplan in New York, leading him to be named one of the “10 thrilling rediscoveries from 2012.”
published in November 2015
English edition
18 x 24,8 cm (hardcover)
248 pages (color & b/w ill.)
ISBN : 978-88-6749-175-9
EAN : 9788867491759
sold out
