Giorgio Griffa is a prominent Italian abstract painter whose career spans over five decades, marked by a distinctive approach to painting that challenges traditional notions of completion and formality. Born on March 29, 1936, in Turin, Italy, Griffa's journey into the art world was unconventional. Despite his profound artistic interest from childhood and early lessons from local painters at the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin, he never pursued a formal art education. Instead, Griffa completed a degree in law in 1958 and became a practicing lawyer, a profession that he would eventually leave to dedicate himself to painting. In the 1960s, Griffa's artistic direction took a significant turn. He began working as an assistant to Filippo Scroppo, a member of the MAC (Art Concreta) movement and a teacher at the Accademia Albertina in Turin. This period was crucial for Griffa as he honed his skills and developed his unique visual language. By 1968, he had abandoned figurative painting, embracing a format of abstract painting that continues to characterize his work to this day. Griffa's paintings are known for their raw, unstretched canvases made of materials such as cotton, linen, and burlap. These canvases are directly nailed to the wall along their top edge, emphasizing the materiality and the process of painting. When not exhibited, his works are folded and stacked, with the resulting creases becoming an integral part of the compositions. This method aligns with Griffa's belief that a painting is "constant and never finished," a concept that reflects the influence of Zen philosophy and the idea that the artist's hand should serve the "intelligence of the material." Throughout his career, Griffa has been associated with various art movements, including Arte Povera and Minimalism, yet he has maintained a degree of independence from these labels. His work is characterized by simple, repetitive gestures that create patterns and rhythms on the canvas. These gestures are often applied with a brush or sponge at set intervals, akin to a musical score or the rhythm of human experience. Griffa's paintings are not about representing something; they are about the act of painting itself. Griffa's early work in the 1960s and 1970s featured minimal compositions with ordered horizontal and vertical lines. As his practice evolved, he began to incorporate more expressive forms, brighter tones, and a broader range of gestures. The 1980s saw the inclusion of numerical systems in his artwork, reflecting his interest in mathematics and scientific structures such as the Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio. These elements act as a parallel to Griffa's practice, suggesting an infinite sequence within the finite frame of his canvas. Despite his early associations with Arte Povera, Griffa's visual style is distinct. His work is imbued with a conceptual rigor and a painterly intent on solving contemporary visual problems. His paintings from the 1990s, for instance, are notable for their light-handed expressiveness and the use of simple, repetitive strokes that create limited patterns. These patterns, often not filling the entire picture plane, invite the viewer to engage with the work and complete it in their own perception. Griffa's first solo exhibition was in New York in 1970 at Ileana Sonnabend's gallery. However, his work was not exhibited in the United States for the next 40 years until the exhibition "Fragments 1968-2012" at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York, which brought him renewed international attention. His exhibition history includes participation in significant international exhibitions such as Prospekt in Düsseldorf, the Venice Biennale, and solo presentations in various cities across Europe and the United States. Today, Giorgio Griffa continues to live and work in his hometown of Turin, Italy. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the GAM in Turin, the Castello di Rivoli, the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO). Griffa's art remains a testament to the power of simplicity and the profound impact of a gesture, a line, or a color on the raw canvas of possibility.

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