Giorgio Griffa
Summer 69

Lines, segments, and marks. Horizontal, vertical, oblique. Imprints of sponge, thumb, brush. Oil for the last time; then acrylic, pastel, and graphite. Color applied with brushes, but also with a palette knife or directly from the tube, on raw canvases, free or freed from the stretcher. Primary signs.

The rhythm and the humble, millenary gesture of laying out and folding the canvas. Then, under the August sun, a sudden spark imbued with playfulness and wit. A mocking gaze, a cigarette between his lips, brushes tucked into his belt like pistols. A faun-like smile and movements: a shamanic dance in which the painter becomes one with the tools of painting.

Summer 1969. An intimate and magical moment, like the Turin of those years, captured in the magnificent photographs of Paolo Mussat Sartor. Giorgio Griffa steps into the new spaces of Galleria Sperone, not yet open to the public. He gathers the fruits and energy of a research begun at the age of eight or ten and matured throughout the 1960s, arriving at his unmistakable painting of signs that, as he says, “belong to everyone’s hand.”

Some of the canvases that appear in the 1969 photographs will be exhibited in the Art Space of the Fondazione Giorgio Griffa, alongside a selection of Sartor’s photographs and a very recent work by Giorgio that traces a line of continuity fifty-seven years later.

Summer 1969. An unforgettable moment, celebrated in turn through another: Giorgio’s 90th birthday