Giorgio Griffa and Zhang Enli in Giorgio Griffa Zhang Enli
8 October 2026—28 January 2027
Duo exhibition at Fondazione Giorgio Griffa, Turin, Italy
Fondazione Giorgio Griffa presents Giorgio Griffa Zhang Enli, an exhibition bringing together works on canvas and paper by the two artists in a dialogue centred on painting that is more alive and relevant than ever. Painting has told the story of the world since the earliest marks traced on the walls of Palaeolithic caves, and it continues to do so today. It has always faced the challenges of its time while embracing its possibilities, and today it finds itself engaging with a reality in constant transformation, intrinsically dynamic in every one of its manifestations. How can painting, traditionally understood as a static phenomenon, respond to such a challenge?
Giorgio Griffa and Zhang Enli follow parallel paths. Both proceed from a shared renunciation of the painter’s claim to domination: the artist is no longer the supreme creator, but part of an unfolding process. Griffa writes, “My hand is at the service of painting.” Zhang says, “My mind is empty before the canvas.” Their painting speaks of today’s universe in perpetual transformation, itself becoming becoming.
Establishing a dialogue between generations, and between East and West, the sequence of their works throughout the exhibition generates its own dynamic, creating rhythms, convergences and shifts.. On the one hand, Griffa entrusts bare canvas, mark, colour and silence with the task of allowing painting’s own intelligence to emerge: not to represent the world, but to listen to and reveal its dynamics and energies. On the other, Zhang uses the brush to capture essences and emotional fields, spaces in which perceptions, memories and resonances amplify, transform and disclose unexpected dimensions of reality.
Between mark and colour, gesture and meditation, emptiness and fullness, the exhibition at Fondazione Giorgio Griffa offers a journey through a form of painting that is—or, more precisely, continues to be—a mode of knowledge attuned to its own time. Giorgio Griffa and Zhang Enli trace a path towards a painting founded upon non-domination. They become part of a process far greater than their individual selves, weaving an equal relationship between human intelligence and the intelligences of matter. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that their canvases are able to speak of the becoming of the present: they follow its traces, its hesitations, its most subtle and silent vibrations.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published and edited by Xavier Hufkens, featuring an extensive curatorial essay by Joshua Gong that explores the convergences between the two artists’ practices as well as their distinct cultural foundations.