On the occasion of Giorgio Griffa’s 90th birthday, the Foundation presents Summer 69, an exhibition that returns to a unique and decisive episode in the artist’s journey, in the summer of 1969.
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Lines, segments and dashes. Horizontal, vertical, oblique. Traces of sponge, thumb and brush. Oil for the last time; then acrylic and pastel. Colour applied with brushes, but also with a spatula or the thumb, on raw canvases, free or freed from the stretcher. Primary signs.
The rhythm and the age-old gesture of laying out and folding the canvas. Then, in the August sun, a sudden flash that carries the spirit of play, of jest. A mischievous gaze, cigarette in his mouth and brushes tucked into his belt like pistols. A smile and the movements of a faun: a shamanic dance in which the painter becomes one with the tools of painting.
Summer 69. An intimate and magical moment, like the Turin of those years, captured in the photographs of Paolo Mussat Sartor. Giorgio Griffa steps into the new spaces of the Galleria Sperone, not yet open to the public. He gathers the fruits and the energy of a research matured throughout the 1960s in order to arrive at his own unmistakable painting of signs that “belong to the hand of everyone”.
An energy that reaches the present day and runs through all the canvases in the exhibition: from the lines and dashes of the 12 historical works, to the signs and fields of colour on the eight canvases painted in the first months of 2026, before which Giorgio and Paolo met again for a couple of new photographs, 57 years later.
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The exhibition is part of a series of initiatives promoted by the Fondazione Giorgio Griffa, together with major national and international institutions (including in Turin the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Torino), celebrating the artist’s work on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday.
Three voices for Summer 69
“In 1969 I was 33 years old. When people asked me why I traced those signs, I replied: ‘it seems better to leave space to the 30,000 years of memory of painting than to the 30 years of my own.’ That silent, almost sacred practice of fixing the signs one after another onto the canvas without assigning them any meaning was nevertheless a way of telling the world: the memory of humanity’s relationship with the known and the unknown, which the arts of all times and all peoples have always narrated.”
(Giorgio Griffa)
“I remember everything perfectly from those days in ’69: the strong August light, the sense of lightness, the movements of Giorgio and of a painting freeing itself from its schemes, the clear sensation that something unique, something special, was taking place, and the desire to capture its energy in a series of photographs.”
(Paolo Mussat Sartor)
“In 1969 I met Giorgio Griffa, who immediately struck me as an artist to frame and promote: an ‘io diviso’, divided between rationality and the desire to push painting onto slippery terrains never explored before. The photographs taken by Mussat embody a clear dichotomy: Art as a project-driven practice of rupture, and the will to remain immersed in the sweetness of painting.”
(Gian Enzo Sperone)