Produced on the occasion of the Giorgio Griffa, Fragments 1968-2012 at Casey Kaplan Gallery. New York, October 25–December 22, 2012.

The exhibition presented a selection from over forty years of Griffa’s paintings on un-stretched canvas and linen. Throughout the past four decades, Griffa has undertaken a practice that he describes as “constant and never finished”, adhering to “the memory of material”, and to the belief that the gesture of painting is an infinite one. 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. This relationship is further mediated by the materiality of the works: the absorption of the acrylic into the fabric from each stroke dictates the brush’s next move. The completion of a canvas functions as a suspension of this relationship. After the acrylic has dried, they are carefully and neatly folded into uniform sections and filed as a register of their collective life as a whole.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Giorgio Griffa at Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, from 13 February–24 April 24, 2016.

The art of the italian artist Giorgio Griffa developed quietly and with impressive coherence outside the latest movements broadly outlined on the contemporary scene. At the beginning of his career Griffa nonetheless associated himself with the representatives of Arte Povera, with whom he exhibited on numerous occasions in the 1960s and 1970s. His simultaneously “minimalist” painting also displayed an affinity in particular with the group Supports/Surfaces in France.

With texts by Bice Curiger, Giorgio Griffa, Francesco Manacorda.

Abstract painter Giorgio Griffa, closely linked to the Arte Povera movement, first became known in the 1960s as part of an Italian generation of artists who sought to radically redefine painting.

Believing in the ‘intelligence of painting’, Griffa allows the essential elements of his process, such as the type or width of the brush, the colour or dilution of the paint and the nature of the canvas, whether linen, cotton, hemp or jute, to influence and form the work. Griffa’s approach is performative and time-based—often working horizontally on the floor, his rhythmic, formal gestures soak into the unprimed and unstretched material.

Double Page was a 6 part periodical produced by Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zurich. This second edition, from December 1976, is devoted to the work of Giorgio Griffa.

Printed on the occasion of Giorgio Griffa’s 1975 exhibition at Kunstraum Munchen. Actual size reproductions of 31 works on paper.

This catalogue is an extension of the book Giorgio Griffa: Works 1965–2015. Published on the occasion of the cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the work of Giorgio Griffa at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto; Bergen Kunsthall; and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome in 2015 and 2016.

From 1967 through to his most recent works, Giorgio Griffa’s painting studies have been based upon three fundamental areas of enquiry: rhythm, sequence and sign. Griffa uses a similar protocol when creating his works on paper, which have very rarely been exhibited and have remained virtually unknown to the public. One need only look through the critical literature devoted to his work, or at the long list of solo and group exhibitions he has been involved in, to see the extent to which drawing is taken into consideration only very occasionally and marginally, even by his closest commentators. However, it seems clear from the quantity and especially the quality of these works that drawing and watercolour are not just some secondary activity for this artist, or in any way subordinate to painting. As Griffa himself points out in a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, drawing is not a ‘plan for a painting,’ even though in many cases it does provide ideas for later works. Rather, it is an autonomous aspect of his work and a kind of parallel activity to painting.