FROM 14 MAY 2016 TO 04 SEP 2016

‘His art deserves a place in the global history of abstraction.’
Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first large-scale museum survey of the paintings and drawings of Giorgio Griffa. It is the Italian artist’s first exhibition in Portugal. The exhibition is the culmination of a series of shows originating at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève (Switzerland), travelling to the Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (Norway) and the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (Italy). Curated by Serralves Museum director Suzanne Cotter and Andrea Bellini, Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève, the exhibition at Serralves presents an expanded selection of more than thirty paintings and over forty drawings dating from 1969 to 2015. Surveying Griffa’s highly abstract yet eminently pictorial production, this ambitious exhibition reveals the artist’s commitment to the practice of painting as a cumulative process whose continuum is part of a broader physical and metaphysical reality.

Giorgio Griffa (1936, Turin, Italy) is part of the Italian generation of artists who came of age in the 1960s and proposed a radical redefinition of painting. From the late 1960s, Griffa set about reducing painting to its essential components of raw, unstretched canvas, pigment and brushstrokes, stripped of expressive subjectivity, radically redefining the medium and its possibilities within a world in transformation. While his use of simple materials and gestures aligns him with the work of the Italian arte povera artists and the proponents of Support/Surface in France, who were his peers in the 1960s and 1970s, his interest in the immediacy and performative dimension of painting as a time-based process was also inspired by Zen philosophy. During the 1980s, a return to neo-expressionism and the Italian transavanguardia marked for Griffa a period of re-engagement with the expressive potential of his elemental use of colour, line and gesture that had sustained his practice in the previous decade. Inspired in part by fellow artist Mario Merz’s use of the Fibonacci sequence, in the 1990s the numbers of the golden ratio entered into Griffa’s pictorial language. His paintings from the past two decades bring together these constitutive elements with renewed vigour and vital urgency. The works in the exhibition at Serralves reflect these key moments in Griffa’s oeuvre, including important paintings from the artist’s cycle of paintings known as ‘Alter Ego’ that constitute a conceptual and intellectual dialogue with painters from Tintoretto to Matisse and Agnes Martin.Continue Reading..