Giorgio Griffa (born in

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The ...

, 29 March 1936) is an Italian abstract painter living and working in

Biography

Giorgio Griffa never received a formal art education. He began painting as a child, taking lessons from local painters at the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin.
After completing a degree in law in 1958, Griffa became a practicing lawyer.
In the sixties, Griffa began working as an assistant to the Italian painter Filippo Scroppo, a member of the MAC (Art Concreta) movement and a teacher at the

Accademia Albertina The Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti ("Albertina Academy of Fine Arts") is an institution of higher education in Turin, Italy History In the first half of the seventeenth century, there was a "University of Painters, Sculptors and Architects" ...

in Turin.

Work

In 1968, Giorgio Griffa 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 midsentence." 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 gallery Casey Kaplan is a contemporary art gallery in New York City, in the United States. History The gallery was founded in 1995 in a , one-room space located on the upper floor of a cast iron loft building on Broadway, before moving to Greene Street ...

in New York, leading him to be named one of the "10 thrilling rediscoveries from 2012." His exhibition was interrupted by Hurricane Sandy and later reopened in 2013. In her review of the exhibition, Roberta Smith wrote "His art deserves a place in the global history of abstraction".Roberta Smith, ''Giorgio Griffa: Fragments, 1968–2012''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

, February 7, 2013

Exhibition history

Giorgio Griffa exhibited at Sonnabend gallery in New York in 1970 and participated in important international exhibitions such as Prospekt, Düsseldorf (1969 and 1974) and the Venice Biennale (1978 and 1980). Other important early exhibitions include Processes of Visualized Thought: Young Italian Avant-garde, Kunstmuseum Luzern(1970) and A Painting Exhibition of Painters who Place Painting in Question, curated by Michel Claura, Stadtische Museum, Monchengladbach (1973). Recent solo presentations of Giorgio Griffa's works include Uno and Due, Galleria Civica d'Art Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2002), Neuer Kunstverein, Aschaffenburg (2005), MACRO, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2011), Golden Ratio,

Mies van der Rohe Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd ...

Haus, Berlin (2013) Fragments 1968 – 2012, Casey Kaplan, New York (2013) and Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève (2015). In 2015,
'To relieve the worldABC-ARTE Genova
with the patronage o
Genova Municipality
A Continuous Becoming, Camden Art Centre, London (2018)

Permanent collections

*GAM, Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin *

Castello di Rivoli The Castle of Rivoli is a former Residence of the Royal House of Savoy in Rivoli ( Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy). It is currently home to the Castello di Rivoli – Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, the museum of contemporary art of Turin. In 19 ...

, Rivoli, Turin *Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Rome * Museo del Novecento, Milan *

Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome The Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, it, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma, italic=no, usually known as MACRO, is a municipal contemporary art museum in Rome, Italy. The museum is housed in two separate places: a former brewery in Via Nizza, ...

(MACRO), Rome

References

Bibliography

* Paolo Fossati e Mario Bertoni, ''Griffa'', Ravenna, Essegi, 1990. * Alberto Fitz, ''Giorgio Griffa. Segnando Pittura'', Milano, Silvana, 2008. * Ivan Quaroni, "Giorgio Griffa : esonerare il mondo
to relieve the world
, ABC-ARTE S.r.l, 2015, Bilingual edition 96 pages, Publisher: ABC-ARTE S.r.l, , Dimensions: 26,5x19,2

External links

Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano: Giorgio Griffa
{{DEFAULTSORT:Griffa, Giorgio 1936 births Living people 20th-century Italian painters Italian male painters Italian contemporary artists Contemporary painters Abstract painters 20th-century Italian male artists