Sophie J Williamson on Giorgio Griffa | In the Gallery | Xavier Hufkens

Filmed on the occasion of the exhibition 'Luce bio' at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (23 September-5 November 2022).
Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936, Turin; lives and works in Turin) is an Italian abstract painter whose works on unprimed and unstretched canvases are nailed to the wall. His visual language is simple and universal, comprising lines, dots, geometric forms and repeating linear patterns, which are often used alongside letters, texts or numerals. Another distinguishing feature is the artist’s preference for diluted pigments in luminous, desaturated colours. During this time, he has created eleven major cycles, ranging from the early Segni primari canvases to his recent Dilemma paintings. Each grouping possesses a start date but is otherwise open-ended. Furthermore, certain works belong to more than one category since Griffa’s creative trajectories-typically inspired by music, mathematics, philosophy, poetry and literature-often intersect and coalesce. Many paintings contain elements that can, in theory, be continued indefinitely (e.g., the numbers in the Fibonacci series) or which are extracted from a larger whole (e.g., lines from a poem). This creates the idea of a ‘before’ and ‘after’, be it of a sequence, pattern or text.
Sophie J Williamson is a curator based in London and Margate. She is initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a commissioning, broadcasting, publishing, and research programme focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological. From 2013-2021, she was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre, producing major exhibitions of artists such as Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Moyra Davey, Ben Rivers, and Vivian Suter, among many others. She was part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009-13), one of London’s most critically acclaimed spaces. Her writing appears in ArtMonthly, frieze, Elephant, October, and numerous exhibition publications. Her anthology, Translation (MIT Press) brings together writings by artists, poets, authors, and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil. She is currently undertaking her PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, titled Being-with-Dying: Living with Agency in the Anthropocene.
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