Casey Kaplan
Giorgio Griffa
Centre Pompidou
March 2 – June 6, 2022
Christine Macel, curator
Aurélien Bernard and Rozane Ilias, assistant curators
This exhibition of a group of eighteen works donated to the Musée national d’art moderne by Giorgio Griffa invites us to rediscover this major actor in the history of Italian and European painting in the second half of the 20th century, who is still underknown to the general public. Associated with the Italian pittura analytica (Analytical Painting) movement at the turn of the 1970s, exhibited with several artists from the BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni) and Supports / Surfaces groups, he nevertheless always retained great independence and originality. Both austere and joyful, his work swings in a subtle balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac.
The exhibition presents several cycles from 1969 to 2021 and reveals a previously unknown work made especially for the Centre Pompidou, entitled La Recherche (The Search, 2021), as reference to Marcel Proust. Consisting of twenty-four transparent canvases hanging on the wall, creating partial overlaps, La Recherche reveals an ever more free and joyful painting.