Giorgio Griffa at Camden Arts Centre

The exhibition finished in early April; I went several times, the work really grew on (?in) me. A video in which the artist talks about the work, and his relationship to the materials, is here.

Lines and shapes of colour painted onto, or rather, into, unprimed fabric, which has been folded and retains those fold marks. Many works are large and fill the rooms of the gallery wonderfully. It was hard to stop taking photographs: each new angle was another spatial revelation.

Frammenti, a work from the 1980s, was reconfigured in response to the
architecture, atmospherics, and light of the gallery

The number used in these works from the early 2000s is the Golden Ratio

 Details -

When I revisited, just before the exhibition closed, I spent some time in the Reading Room, where books about Griffa's previous exhibitions were laid out.

This collage (?montage) of marks on transparent paper, exhibited at the XXXIX Venice Biennale (1980) caught my eye and imagination ... how, if at all, could it be done in stitch (and: why?) ....

Other works had been exhibited in a medieval palazzo in 1995 -

One of the books had text on the right-hand page, and a tantalising flutter of careful marks and colours on the left -

 In his studio! -

 A happy conjunction of fragments -

 Larger works, fitted onto the page -

 Fragments and overlays -

"Griffa sees painting as an unmediated experience of the physical world. Though often minimal from afar, his works invite intimate attention to the exacting behaviours of their materials, to consider the experience of pigment on canvas at a molecular level. ... The modest appearance [of the creased canvases] reaffirms their reality in material and temporal terms, while underlying each work with a geoetric grid."