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Giorgio Griffa
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Giorgio Griffa is an Italian abstract painter, born in 1936 in Turin, Italy. He is best known for his images painted on raw, unstretched canvas, linen and burlap. Griffa showed artistic interest in his childhood, and began painting as a child, taking lessons from local painters at the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin, but he never received a formal art education. Griffa became a practicing lawyer after completing a degree in law in 1958. 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 Albertina Academy in Turin.
The format of his paintings that still characterizes his work to this day, his own personal style of abstract art was found in 1968, when he abandoned figurative painting. This is best described in a sentence 'I don't portray anything, I paint', as Griffa himself stated. Painting with acrylic on raw materials, Griffa's works are nailed directly to the wall along their top edge. The works are neatly folded and stacked into uniform sections when not exhibited, resulting creases that create an underlying grid for his compositions, which are active part of the painting as a color and …
Giorgio Griffa is an Italian abstract painter, born in 1936 in Turin, Italy. He is best known for his images painted on raw, unstretched canvas, linen and burlap. Griffa showed artistic interest in his childhood, and began painting as a child, taking lessons from local painters at the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin, but he never received a formal art education. Griffa became a practicing lawyer after completing a degree in law in 1958. 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 Albertina Academy in Turin.
The format of his paintings that still characterizes his work to this day, his own personal style of abstract art was found in 1968, when he abandoned figurative painting. This is best described in a sentence 'I don't portray anything, I paint', as Griffa himself stated. Painting with acrylic on raw materials, Griffa's works are nailed directly to the wall along their top edge. The works are neatly folded and stacked into uniform sections when not exhibited, resulting creases that create an underlying grid for his compositions, which are active part of the painting as a color and lines itself. Griffa's idea that 'the painting is constant and never finished', displays in his unique composition of each of his paintings. Always created from top left corner to right, his works display a deliberate end-point, maybe most precisely described as 'stopping a thought midsentence'. Within the finite frame of his canvas, each artwork becomes a site of collaboration between painting and the painter as the hand works to reveal a constellation of signs and symbols.
Griffa's first solo exhibition was in New York in 1970, at Ileana Sonnabend's gallery. Despite early associations with movements such as Arte Povera and Minimalism, Giorgio Griffa's work was not exhibited in the United States for the next 40 years, until the exhibition named Fragments 1968-2012 at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York, which sums up four decades of Griffa's career.
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