Giorgio Griffa
In one of those happy moments walking through the Tate modern I came across one of his paintings.
I can’t explain exactly how I first discovered his work. Maybe whilst researching painting the backdrop for the Lion King for my daughter’s school play. Discovering more about Griffa became a bit of an obsession, but very few of books about him have been published.
Catalogue
Coming back from a run I came across Giorgio Griffa Alter Ego 1979-2008 in Herne Hills Oxfam book store. I believe is a catalogue to an exhibition, supported by IGAV at the Castiglia di Saluzzo. I didn’t buy it as I had no cash on me and I felt their price was father steep. But after a restless night thinking I’d wanted a catalogue, I went back the next day to purchase it. Fortunately it was still there and my tsunduko habit for art and design books was quelled for another week.
Very lucky that a catalogue for an Italian exhibition turned up in Herne Hill.
Tate wall label
Giorgio Griffa 1936
Born and works Italy
Tre Linee con arabesco n.111 1991
Three lines with arabesque No.111
Acrylic paint on canvas
Griffa started painting simple repeated signs on unstretched canvases in 1967. He was interested in the material qualities of painting and intentionally left folds in his canvases to stress their physical presence. His sequences of marks are always left interrupted, in a way that suggests their natural continuation. ‘I liked to preserve this sense of fragmentation, of something provisional, something that… makes no claim to represent [the word] definitively or entirely.’ In the early 1990s Griffa also began to include numbers in his work, as a different kind of abstraction from reality. Here ‘111’ indicates the work’s order within this series of paintings.
Tsundoku
Tsun (積ん): Derived from the verb “tsumu” (積む), meaning “to pile up”.
Doku (読): Derived from “dokusho” (読書), meaning “reading”.
Tsundoku (積ん読) combines these elements to describe the practice of buying books and allowing them to accumulate without being read.
IGAV
The Istituto Garuzzo per le Arti Visive (IGAV) is a non-profit organisation, established in 2005, funded and managed by the family of Italian industrialist George Garuzzo with the object of supporting contemporary art and specifically to help young emerging Italian artists to become known in the international arena.
Press release for the exhibition Alter Ego
(Google translated)
From March 27 to May 22, the Castiglia di Saluzzo will host Giorgio Griffa. ALTER EGO, 1979-2008, a retrospective exhibition of Giorgio Griffa’s work, curated by Martina Corgnati and organized by the Garuzzo Institute for the Visual Arts in collaboration with the City of Saluzzo. Igav, a non-profit organization based in Turin since 2005, supports the expression of Italian visual arts by promoting national and international exhibitions, international exchanges, and cultural initiatives. With the Giorgio Griffa exhibition, specifically conceived for the spaces of the Castiglia, Igav inaugurates a new exhibition season in the ancient fortified residence of the Marquises of Saluzzo, dedicated to the great masters.
Giorgio Griffa (Turin 1936) is one of the most original and well-known Italian artists of his generation for his characteristic support/surface painting style, applied with watercolours on unframed canvases that freely interact with the space and the wall. His lines, arabesques, spongings, and coloured dots that seem to chase and play on the surface are the result of a rigorous analysis of the minimal and elementary components of painting, but at the same time express a joy in colour and decoration, in the “high” sense that we have inherited from Matisse, a typically European one. Griffa is therefore the most suitable artistic personality to open this exhibition of the great local masters who have left their mark on the national and international scene.
In the words of curator Martina Corgnati: “In his exploration, which began many decades ago and is structured around a return to painting’s constituent components—line, dot, colored spot, and canvas—understood as an integral part of the pictorial process, Giorgio Griffa has shaped a new, inimitable language and, at the same time, has opened an important path not only for painting but for artistic practice in general. He never tires of repeating that his work, ultimately, is nothing other than the construction of the right conditions to allow the very nature of things to manifest, in the presence of an artist who acts not so much as a creator as a catalyst.”
Griffa has always been active in Piedmont, where he trained and has worked since the late 1960s. With this exhibition, he returns to enchant his audience with a cycle executed from 1979 to 2008, comprising eighteen large-scale works, each dedicated to an artist from the past, both recent and distant, with whom Giorgio Griffa feels a special affinity: ” Minimalist painting has never ceased its dialogue with the age-old memory of painting, even against the will of its authors. I believe that within it, over time, a line of thought has emerged that aims to make these memories explicit without falling back into restoration hypotheses… This cycle of works of mine, begun not coincidentally in the late 1970s, belongs to this story, even though I have never been a minimalist, and it looks to specific memories of painting, to other artists of the present and the past. Painting, as a process that depicts its own evolution, is still painting; it is born and germinates in the soil made fertile by others, artists and otherwise. It belongs to the world rather than to itself .”
This is therefore a “themed” anthological exhibition that will allow us to appreciate a still unknown and unpublished part of his work.
The Mayor of Saluzzo, Paolo Allemano, particularly appreciates the project: “The challenge we accepted and won with IGAV two years ago marked the beginning of a collaboration that has continued and strengthened with the opening of its Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art on the ground floor of the building last year and now with this exhibition. This is a high-level and impactful exhibition, which offers us the opportunity and honor of welcoming an extraordinary artist to Castiglia.”
On the occasion of the Giorgio Griffa exhibition, the IGAV’s Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art on the ground floor of the Castiglia will also be reopened and presented in a new guise.
Giorgio Griffa currently has a solo exhibition underway at the MACRO in Rome.
Designed and developed by IGAV, in collaboration with the City of Saluzzo.
Under the patronage of the Piedmont Region and the Province of Cuneo.
With the contribution of the Casa Risparmio Torino Foundation.
With the support of the Cassa Risparmio Saluzzo Foundation and BBC Benevagienna.
Official partner: Flyren.
Giorgio Griffa ALTER EGO 1979-2008
An IGAV project for the Castiglia di Saluzzo
curated by Martina Corgnati
From 27 March to 22 May 2011