Giorgio Griffa Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Giorgio Griffa (Turin, 29 March 1936) is an Italian painter, among the main international exponents of contemporary pictorial research from the 1960s to today. He began painting while still a child and received his first teachings from traditional painters who at the time attended the Circolo degli Artisti, an ancient Turin institution. Read the full biography

Giorgio Griffa Biography

Giorgio Griffa (Turin, 29 March 1936) is an Italian painter, among the main international exponents of contemporary pictorial research from the 1960s to today. He began painting while still a child and received his first teachings from traditional painters who at the time attended the Circolo degli Artisti, an ancient Turin institution. In 1958 he graduated in law and has practiced as a lawyer ever since. From 1960 to 1963 he was a pupil of Filippo Scroppo, abstract painter and teacher at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, collaborator of Felice Casorati and member of the Concrete Art Movement or MAC. However, only in the mid-1960s abstract elements began to appear in Griffa's figurative paintings, marking the start of those reflections on the status of painting, on the tools of painting and on the position of the artist which would lead to the cycle of "primary signs". with which the imprint of his pictorial journey begins. It will be precisely the canvases of the "primary signs" that place him among the protagonists of the debate of those years, which develops on the ashes of the informal and winds through American pop-art and conceptual art. In that period, at the urging of Aldo Mondino, he came into contact with the work of Giulio Paolini who worked on splitting the different components of the artistic object: a different path but with points of contact. Griffa's arrival at the Sperone Gallery at the end of the 1960s places him in relation to a series of artists whose work is attributed the label of Arte Povera, among which, in particular, Giovanni Anselmo, Gilberto Zorio became significant interlocutors for Griffa and Giuseppe Penone. Marco Gastini will also be an ally in poetics and ideology: a significant interweaving between their works is demonstrated by an exhibition in 1972 at the Galleria Fiori in Florence, "conceived" and set up together. Since 2007 he has been among the ninety national academics of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Despite having been associated with movements such as Arte Povera, Analytical Painting or Minimalism, Giorgio Griffa's artistic path remains mostly solitary and cannot be classified into a specific current. Well over 40 years have passed since the beginning of his personal painting formula, but Griffa continues in his original footsteps as a painter, still in Turin, where he still lives and paints. Many years after his first exhibition in the United States in 1970 at the Ileana Sonnabend gallery in New York, in December 2012 his solo exhibition Fragments 1968 – 2012 at the Casey Kaplan gallery also in New York led him to be mentioned as one of the «10 most exciting rediscoveries of 2012». In her review of the exhibition, the American art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times: «His art deserves a place in the world history of abstract art».