Works on Paper is a group exhibition featuring works by twenty-six artists represented by Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, including Giorgio Griffa. For the first time, the gallery is dedicating an exhibition exclusively to works on paper, shining a light on the vast array of possibilities arising from the one same medium. The show retraces hypothetical “genealogies”—from the conception of an initial idea to its gestation, evolution, and eventual release along different, autonomous trajectories, all inextricably tied to each artist's broader practice.
With their diverse styles and approaches, the artists showcased integrate works on paper into their practice in equally diverse ways. By turns, drawing becomes a space for daily meditation, a playground for fun experimentation, a means of recovery and regeneration, or a private refuge. The works range from sweeping gestures to delicate lines, from abstraction to figuration, simultaneously honoring and at times subverting the academic traditions of drawing and draftsmanship.
For Giorgio Griffa, works on paper have always run side by side his painting on canvas since his first Primary Signs. Paper has offered him the opportunity to explore techniques such as watercolor, tempera, ink, pencil, and charcoal. Each work on paper is an autonomous creation—never a sketch or preparatory project—but rather another path to nurture the hand and give voice to the history and memory of marks and colors. Elements deeply rooted in Griffa's practice, which have accompanied humankind in its millennia-long pursuit of understanding the world.
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Introduction by Sofia Freeman, Casey Kaplan Gallery
Since 1968, Giorgio Griffa has developed a painting practice that records “the memory of material,” allowing brush, paint, and canvas to dictate the outcome of his work. By eliminating perspective and narrative, Griffa’s “fragments of space” transcribe the process of painting into simple repeated marks and groups of horizontal, vertical, or oblique lines.
Griffa’s works on paper evolve in parallel with his painting practice, as he transitions fluidly in the studio between canvas and paper. For this exhibition, Griffa presents a selection of works on paper from the late 1960s to 1980s, each complementing his daily painting process, highlighting both the universality of the unadorned line and the symbiosis between artist and medium. The late 1960s and 70s were formative for the artist, establishing a logic in which the restrained gesture became both distinctive and integral, driven by notions of time, rhythm, and memory. These early, minimal compositions began with an “anonymous” sign—ordered horizontal and vertical lines—displaying the simple and repetitive movement of the artist’s paintbrush to create uniform task-like marks that serve to record the process of painting.
The 1980s marked distinct progressions in Griffa’s practice, in which minimalist ideals of the previous decade were infused with a raw and expressive treatment of surface, color, and line. Griffa’s shift was partly inspired by his interest in the work of Henri Matisse and motifs found in Roman frescoes of the ancient city of Pompeii. Bold forms are seen in combination with playful variations in line and unfinished planes that infused the rhythmic patterns with a lyrical quality. While continuing to engage with notions of time and memory, these shifts reveal Griffa's commitment to the ideal of painting—existing outside any singular stylistic, moralistic, or temporal constraint—and his interest in the relationship between the predetermined and the unconscious, thereby enriching his exploration of painting's fundamental elements.
