Giorgio Griffa

Giorgio Griffa’s abstract works explore the possibilities of painting through a deliberately reduced visual language. Working in Turin in the late 1960s, Griffa’s practice developed alongside the post-war Italian movements of Arte Povera and Pittura Analitica, while remaining distinct from either style. Painting directly onto unstretched, unprimed canvas, Griffa uses diluted pigments to create lyrical sequences of lines, dots, arabesques, numbers and geometric forms. Deliberately anonymous, these elementary marks are conceived as gestures that might belong to any hand, while his compositions are left unfinished, appearing as fragments of larger structures that extend beyond the boundaries of the canvas. Across a series of overlapping cycles, Griffa draws on mathematics, music, philosophy, poetry and literature, incorporating numerical systems, letters and fragments of text. These recurring elements establish a sense of rhythm as colour bleeds into the raw fabric, reflecting Griffa’s approach to painting as an open-ended process in which material, gesture and sign determine the development of each work.

Giorgio Griffa was born in Turin, Italy, in 1936. He graduated in law from the University of Turin in 1960, before studying painting with Filippo Scroppo at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin, from 1962 to 1964. Griffa’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo exhibitions at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2015); Serralves Museum, Porto (2016); Camden Arts Centre, London (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2026). Selected group exhibitions include Prospect 69, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1969); Processes of Visualized Thought: Young Italian Avant-garde, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (1970); A Painting Exhibition of Painters who Place Painting in Question, Städtisches Museum, Mönchengladbach (1973); the Venice Biennale (1978, 1980 and 2017); Materials and Objects, Tate Modern, London (2019); and the São Paulo Art Biennial, São Paulo (2021). His work is held in major public collections including Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; MAXXI, Rome; Museo del Novecento, Milan; and Tate, London. Griffa currently lives and works in Turin.