Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest
It is a great honor to present Giorgio Griffa’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, coinciding with the energetic artist’s ninetieth birthday. The Clark provides an especially fitting setting, where Griffa’s deep historical references and engagement with the natural world resonate with both our collections and the surrounding landscape,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark.
“Giorgio Griffa considers himself a classical painter yet his work and his thinking—especially in its ecological dimensions—is bracingly contemporary,” said exhibition curator Robert Wiesenberger, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, former curator of contemporary projects at the Clark.
For almost sixty years, Giorgio Griffa has explored the potential of painting in a practice that is both rigorous and lyrical. Griffa paints with diluted acrylics in pastel colors on unstretched, unprimed canvases. These are tacked to the wall for display and folded for storage, a memory of which persists in their creases. Griffa values “the intelligence of materials” and views his paintings as neither representational nor abstract, but as real, material facts.
“Impersonal marks that belong to any hand, with thousands of years of memory” are Griffa’s subject; he follows and blurs the lines of drawing, counting, and writing. Griffa “interrupts” his paintings before they are finished because, “in the meantime, life has moved on,” an idea he credits to Zen Buddhism. Like the artist himself, each work remains vital: “Leaving the work incomplete means symbolically omitting that final point, which, like the period at the end of this sentence, fixes it in the past.”
To date, Griffa has made thirteen cycles, or loose and connected bodies of work, each with its own compositional idea. He calls these “different pathways through the same dark forest.” The forest, for him, is a symbol of the unknown. But it also exemplifies Griffa’s ecological ethic: his commitment to growth and change, difference and interrelation, vitality and intelligence. There is no single path for him, nor intention to escape; the unknown is a place to dwell, in pensive darkness and exultant light.
Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, former curator of contemporary projects at the Clark.
This exhibition is made possible by the Edward and Maureen Fennessy Bousa Fund for Contemporary Projects and Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art internationally. Additional support is provided by Margaret and Richard Kronenberg. Support for the catalogue is provided by Michael Alper and Bruce Moore.
