Giorgio Griffa

A continuous path through the great forest of painting.

Born in Turin in 1936, Giorgio Griffa began painting as a child. By the mid-1960s his canvases were already moving toward abstraction while his thinking increasingly focused on the status of painting itself.

In 1967–68 the Primary Signs cycle established the foundations of his practice: water-based acrylic on loose, unprimed canvas laid on the floor, with elementary lines and marks that could “belong to any hand.” The canvas is not stretched but fixed directly to the wall, and the unfinished becomes an active part of the work.

His path developed within the artistic debate that emerged from Art Informel and moved through Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. At the same time, it ran alongside his friends from Arte Povera, with whom Griffa shared a respect for and interest in the intelligence of matter. More than fifty years later, the Foundation describes his trajectory as unique and not frameable within any specific movement.

Over time his research branched into thirteen cycles. They are not chronological stages and do not replace one another: each has a beginning, none has an end. They coexist, intersect and overlap as different paths through what Griffa calls the great forest of painting.

Primary Signs introduced the loose canvas, anonymous sign, non-hierarchical composition and unfinished surface. In the late 1970s Contaminations brought different communities of signs together on the same canvas. Alter Ego, begun in 1979, opened a dialogue with artists, writers and musicians including Matisse, Klein, Klee, Beuys, Van Gogh, Philip Glass, Agnes Martin, Ezra Pound and Eugenio Montale.

In 1980 Fragments used irregular pieces of painted fabric arranged as constellations, while Transparencies grew from the twenty-one canvases of Dioniso, created for the Venice Biennale that year. In the 1990s Numbering made visible the internal sequence of the act of painting. In the early 2000s the Golden Ratio introduced the irrational number 1.618… as a metaphor for art’s encounter with the unknowable.

Across all these developments, Griffa’s signs remain a means of knowledge rather than representation. His colours carry memories of the Mediterranean and Italian fresco painting, while repetition, rhythm, difference and the physical intelligence of the support connect each work to the long historical memory of painting.

Griffa has had more than two hundred solo exhibitions in museums, institutions and galleries worldwide. His international trajectory includes the São Paulo Biennial, three editions of the Venice Biennale, major institutional exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and works in collections including Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou.

In 2023 the artist founded the Fondazione Giorgio Griffa in Turin to promote his work and thought, conserve the Giorgio Griffa Archive and develop exhibitions, publications, events and educational projects. The Archive preserves the register and histories of his works together with publications, exhibition catalogues, photographs, correspondence, interviews and documentary materials spanning his career.