Giorgio Griffa
Paths in the Forest
13 June—12 October 2026
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, USA
For almost sixty years, Giorgio Griffa has explored the potential of painting in a practice that is both rigorous and lyrical. Griffa (born in 1936 in Turin, Italy, where he lives and works) paints with diluted acrylics in pastel colors on unstretched, unprimed canvases. These are tacked to the wall for display and folded for storage, a memory of which persists in their creases. Griffa values “the intelligence of materials” and views his paintings as neither representational nor abstract, but as real, material facts.
“Impersonal marks that belong to any hand, with thousands of years of memory” are Griffa’s subject; he follows and blurs the lines of drawing, counting, and writing. Griffa “interrupts” his paintings before they are finished because, “in the meantime, life has moved on,” an idea he credits to Zen Buddhism. Like the artist himself, each work remains vital: “Leaving the work incomplete means symbolically omitting that final point, which, like the period at the end of this sentence, fixes it in the past.”
To date, Griffa has made thirteen cycles, or loose and connected bodies of work, each with its own compositional idea. He calls these “different pathways through the same dark forest.” The forest, for him, is a symbol of the unknown. But it also exemplifies Griffa’s ecological ethic: his commitment to growth and change, difference and interrelation, vitality and intelligence. There is no single path for him, nor intention to escape; the unknown is a place to dwell, in pensive darkness and exultant light.
Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It is accompanied by a catalogue that includes four scholarly essays, an original text by the artist, and studio and installation photography.
Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, former curator of contemporary projects at the Clark.