The Giorgio Griffa Foundation was established in Turin in 2023 at the behest of the artist. It works to promote and give greater resonance and reach to Giorgio Griifa’s art and thought, while conserving the artist's archive. The foundation produces and organises projects, exhibitions, events, and educational initiatives that explore Griffa's work in connection with the local and international art scenes and cultural movements.
Art Space is the Giorgio Griffa Foundation's new exhibition venue. It is a hive of energy and activity, where the foundation can engage with visitors and art lovers can experience, explore, and interpret art in new and innovative ways.
The foundation's office is located in Via Oropa 28, Turin, in a former industrial complex that also houses the exhibition venue Art Space and Giorgio Griffa's own studio, where he still paints to this day.
Board of Directors
Giorgio Griffa, president
Cesare Griffa, vice-president
Giulio Caresio, vice-president
Born in Turin in 1936, Giorgio Griffa began painting as a child. By the mid-1960s, his canvases showed the first signs of an abstract turn and a deeper thinking about the status of painting.
In 1967/68, his first “Primary Signs” cycle marked the beginning of his distinctive approach to art, featuring signs and lines “belonging to any hand” on unstretched and unprimed canvases painted on the floor. It laid the groundwork for Griffa to become a leading voice in the debate that rose from the ashes of Art Informel and gathered steam through the folds of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Marking the start of his own personal path as an artist, his career would unfold in parallel with his friends from the Arte Povera movement, with whom he shares a respect and interest in the "intelligence of matter."
After more than fifty years and thirteen cycles of painting, Griffa’s artistic career has been truly unique and cannot be framed within any specific art movement. Featured in leading collections and museums worldwide, including the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, his signs and colors are unmistakable, a signature style found with continuity and consistency, vitality and poetic soul across his corpus of works.
