Griffa and Hamana

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Kazunori Hamana, Tsubo, 2022

Working across open-ended series, the Italian painter Giorgio Griffa paints directly onto raw canvas laid onto the floor of his studio. His compositions are conceived intuitively, employing universal forms such as dots, lines, numbers, and letters that draw inspiration from music, poetry, mathematics, and literature. Preferring desaturated tones and anonymous signs while leaving much of the textile surface exposed, Griffa employs a non-hierarchical approach to image making, in which material, form, and colour all become active elements in the image-making process.

Kazunori Hamana’s ceramic sculptures draw on traditional Japanese Tsubo. The works unfold over a prolonged and evolving process, during which the works are weathered and altered by atmospheric shifts and precipitation in conjunction with the artist’s decisive interventions made before the firing process. Working in this way, Hamana fuses the handmade and the natural in an investigation of authorship. The site of their making, the small fishing village of Isumi where the artist lives, becomes an inextricable agent of Hamana’s work as subtle seasonal shifts leave their impression across the clay surface.

Through a restrained and repeated use of minimalist gestures, Griffa and Hamana’s works offer unique records and responses to place, philosophy, and the nature of artistic production and creation.