Six Big Works at the MAXXI

Italy’s National Museum of 21st Century Arts—MAXXI—in Rome has brought to term a major acquisition of six large-scale works by Giorgio Griffa for its public collection. The monumentally-sized works cover the key stages and turning points of the master’s long and multi-faceted career, from his early works in the 1970s through to the new millennium. The acquisition marks an important step forward in expanding Griffa’s visibility in Italian contemporary art museums, as they catch up with the international galleries that hold a large number of his works in their collections.

Worldwide, Griffa’s works feature in a number of leading collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Serralves Foundation in Porto, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Obayashi Foundation in Japan. In Italy his works are found at the Castello di Rivoli and the GAM in Turin, at the MACRO in Rome and the Museo del Novecento in Milan, at the MART in Rovereto and the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan, and now the MAXXI in Rome.

The six works acquired by the MAXXI include three canvases from the early Primary Signs cycle, which marked the start of Griffa’s extraordinary career. Dating between 1968 and the mid-1970s, the works feature the distinctive marks that would go on to become a signature motif throughout all his later cycles of paintings. In them we see Griffa’s turn away from figuration as unessential to painting and his choice of marks that belong to any hand, as well as the freedom of a creative process that is a means unto itself and which continuously eludes any formal label. Then there is his disregard for the traditional hierarchical relationship between the creative painter-master and the plain canvas-servant to search instead for alternative paths to the principle of domination. Finally, the adoption of unstretched canvases for practical reasons to facilitate larger scales of painting, but also to allow the canvas to express its identity and freedom, and the Zen-inspired decision to leave paintings “unfinished” so as to avoid the full-stop that would consign the work to the past, suggesting that the painting continues in the present.

All this laid the bases for the work Linee Orizzontali (Horizontal Lines) from 1973, where simple, essential lines convey quiet restraint and formal rigor, while leaving large swathes of the unprimed canvas—in this case light in color and tightly woven—to come to the fore and stand out unpainted. The same bases would give rise to the delicate Mediterranean colors—on a darker, open-weave canvas—of Segni Orizzontali (Horizontal Marks, 1975)—a work reminiscent of the painting of the same name held by the Tate Modern in London, but on a larger scale and featuring more varied and ethereal colors. Then there is the monumental work Linee Orizzontali (Horizontal Lines, 1976), which seems to suggest how variations in the thickness of the brushstrokes and the density of the paint are sufficient to step into another dimension with respect to the painting of the same name from 1973. Here, standing up close to the canvas, we discover the universal fractal created by the water-based paint when it comes into contact with the canvas. It is the intelligence of matter at work alongside the hand of the painter, a self-aware and stated move by the artist found in all his work and which connects him to his long-time friends from the Arte Povera movement.

The similarly monumental Arabesco Doppio (Double Arabesque) thrusts us forward to the mid-1980s, into broad fields of color—the three shades of pink, blue, and yellow that Griffa especially loves. Those fields dialogue, in this case, with marks bearing the memory of ornamentation. A memory that is also the memory of human kind—from angular marks of ancient flavor used in cuneiform script and the modern-day bra-ket notation of quantum mechanics, to the arabesque, which in forever unfolding and forever turning back brings together the linear time of the moderns and the circular time of the ancients, and the meander, whose line rises to the heavens and falls into the shadows of the sun, marking the alternation of day and night.

Griffa’s Trittico con Sette Linee (Triptych with Seven Lines) brings us to the 1990s, where the relationship between marks breaks across the borders of the canvases. In a game of connections, on each of the three canvases we find a “set” of seven red lines, the same but different each time, a large field of pink, a series of thick, curly purple lines that move horizontally, and fine vertical blue lines that seem to drop down like vines.

The last work acquired by the MAXXI is entitled Quaranta Tele (Forty Canvases). It takes us back to 2001, to a truly unique work in progress that shows all the variety and complexity of Griffa’s alphabet of marks and colors. Where straight and curly lines, dots, notches, arabesques, meanders, waves, and brushstrokes of various styles, thicknesses, and colors run and skip, chasing each other and leaping from one canvas to another—just as painting has always done, ever since the first markings made by humans on the walls of caves.

It is a process that here becomes playful endeavor, a tribute to the joy and vitality of painting, showing an energy and capacity for renewal that also finds expression in the multiplicity of ways the works can be exhibited—lined up on the same plane along several walls, for instance, or arranged on several planes, modulating the spaces between the canvases, or installed in adjacent rooms or even non-adjacent rooms. The possibilities are endless. Just like with all of Griffa’s painting, capable as it is of taking on ever-new configurations, adapting to the situation and context, and engaging with the space it occupies and the knowledge of the era of those who view it.