TURIN.- To mark Giorgio Griffa’s 90th birthday, the Foundation presents Summer 69, an exhibition that returns to an intimate and magical moment in Giorgio‘s path, in the summer of 1969.

Marks, lines, segments. Horizontal, vertical, diagonal. Sponge marks, thumbprints, brushstrokes. A last use of oil paint, then acrylics and pastels. Paints applied by brush, or with a spatula or by thumb, on unprimed canvases, unstretched and set free. Primary signs.

The age-old act and rhythm of unfolding and refolding a canvas. Then, in the bright August sunshine, a playful trick of the hand, a practical joke. A mischievous squint of the eye, cigarette in mouth, paint brushes tucked in his belt like pistols. The innocent grin and motions of a fawn, in a shamanic dance where the painter becomes one with the tools of painting.

Summer 1969. A moment so intimate and magical, like the Turin of those years, immortalized in the photographs of Paolo Mussat Sartor. Giorgio Griffa stepping through the halls of the Sperone Gallery, still closed to the public, as he soaks up the energy of the fruits of his efforts over the 1960s to forge “his own” inimitable style of painting “impersonal marks that belong to any hand.”

An energy that still burns bright today, a spark found in each of the canvases on show. From the marks and lines of the twelve historical works to the fields and stains of colours of the eight canvases from this year, 57 years on Giorgio and Paolo come together again for a couple of new snapshots.

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The exhibition is part of a series of initiatives promoted by the Giorgio Griffa Foundation, in partnership with major national and international institutions, to celebrate the artist and his work for his 90th birthday.

Three voices from Summer 69

“In 1969 I was 33 and to anyone who asked why I painted marks, I’d reply it was better to make space for thirty thousand years of the memory of painting than to my own thirty years. That silent, sacred practice of setting down on canvas mark after mark, without attributing any meaning to them, was a way of telling the story of the world, of the memory of humankind’s relationship with the known and the unknown, which is what the arts of all ages and all peoples have done.”

(Giorgio Griffa)

“I remember everything from those days in ‘69 perfectly. The bright August light, the carefreeness, the way Giorgio moved, painting that breaks free of the mould to speak its own mind, the precise feeling that something unique and special was happening, and me wanting to capture that energy in a series of snapshots.”

(Paolo Mussat Sartor)

“I met Giorgio Griffa in 1969 and immediately I felt he was someone to frame and promote, an ‘I divided’ between rationality and the desire to take painting onto unknown and slippery new ground. Mussat’s photographs tangibly show a dichotomy—art as an intentional search for rupture and a desire to stay with the sweet reassurances of painting.”

(Gian Enzo Sperone)