Griffa-Viallat
Giorgio Griffa (Torino, 1936) came to visit us in Madrid in the spring of 2010, in preparation for his first solo exhibition in our gallery. When I once asked him about the artists who had influenced him in his life, he told me about the French group Support-Surfaces, and Claude Viallat (Nîmes, 1936). I got to know his work thanks to Griffa. Years later, in September 2017, we opened the gallery season with a solo show dedicated to his work.
Five years further on, we set ourselves the challenge of bringing together the work of these two artists between whom, in addition to mutual admiration, there are strong connections. The concept of repetition is probably the most obvious, but there is also their attention to colour, supports and rhythms in their compositions, as well as the meaning they give to their creations. They never seek to represent: just to paint.
But undoubtedly the very special value or fascination of this exhibition comes from the fact that both painters took part in the selection of works, each of them picking out from their most recent output those works which show a certain complementarity with the works of the other.
Born in 1936 in Nimes, where he still lives and works today, Claude Viallat was the prime mover of what is considered to be the last great movement among the artistic avant-gardes of France: Supports/Surfaces (1969-1972). Despite its brief period of ascendency, its impact on art history was very significant since it called into question the pictorial conventions, starting with the support media for paintings... Read more
key artist in the post-war transformation of Italian art, and at the same time a singular figure, Giorgio Griffa was born in Turin in 1936 and started painting when he was a child. Initially trained as a traditional painter, he began to paint abstract works and develop his personal poetry from the late sixties. He belongs to a group of artists, working in Turin in the mid-60s, who transformed the Italian art of the period: Giovanni Anselmo, Gilberto Zorio, Giulio Paolini, and Mario and Marisa Merz. Griffa himself received little international acclaim until well into his career - despite exhibiting at... Read more
