Giorgio Griffa, Campo Rosa (2022), via Casey Kaplan
On view this month at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, artist Giorgio Griffa brings together a body of new works that continue the artist’s interpretation and mining of memory and reflection as part of an expanded exploration of time and space. OCÉANIE consists of a series of nineteen paintings created between the fall of 2022 and the spring of 2023, marking the most significant shift in Griffa’s practice in over a decade. This is the artist’s sixth solo presentation at the gallery.
Giorgio Griffa, Océanie (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan
Since 1968, Griffa has developed a painting practice that records “the memory of material,” allowing brush, paint, and canvas to dictate the outcome of his work. By eliminating perspective and narrative, Griffa’s “fragments of space” simply record the repetitive and spontaneous sequences of marks and gestures. Flattening planes and reinterpreting familiar forms into two-dimensional, graphical retellings, the artist makes much of an expressive, almost childlike-wonder at the act of composition and expression of the world. These are images pulled from the world, yet responding to the flat plane of the canvas, echoing its structure in a subtle retelling.
Giorgio Griffa, Sette Colori (2022), via Casey Kaplan
Beginning with unprimed, unstretched raw canvas laid out like sheets on the floor, Griffa works slowly across them, crouching and kneeling on the material in a way that aligns him with his tools: water-based acrylic paints, mixed thinly, that seep and bleed upon application. The rawness of the resulting color fields, along with the large areas of unpainted canvas, gives Griffa’s paintings a provisional feel, emphasizing his convictions about the independent life of the materials. The paintings are exhibited unframed, pinned directly to the wall with small nails along their top edge, and when not displayed, are folded into sections and stacked, creating an embossed underlying grid for his compositions.
The artist’s work is on view through October 28th.
Giorgio Griffa, Océanie (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan
– A. Mannekin
Read more:
Casey Kaplan [Exhibition Site]
