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Giorgio Griffa (born in Turin, March 29, 1936) is an Italian painter. Roberta Smith wrote about him «His art deserves a place in the global history of abstraction».

Biography
He began painting when he was a child and took his first lessons by the traditional painters of Circolo degli Artisti, an old “art institution" in Turin.

He graduated in law in 1958 and since then has been a practising lawyer.

In 1960 he became the pupil of Filippo Scroppo. During the debates on painting which in the 1960s rose from the ashes of the informal art and developed under the influence of American pop-art and conceptual art, he was one of the leading fìgures on the Italian scene.

In 1970 he exhibited in Ileana Sonnabend's galleries in New York and Paris.

He took part in numerous national and international exhibitions, which, in the face of the proliferation of extra-pictorial tools, attested to the strong persistence of painting in contemporary artistic experience, as a tool appropriate to the events that were taking place and not just as a means of conservation or restoration or nostalgia for the past.

Particularly noteworthy were the Venice Biennale of 1978 and 1980; Prospekt in Düsseldorf in 1969 and 1973; and the seminal exhibition organized by Michel Claura in 1973 in Paris, Mönchengladbach and Antwerp, under the signifìcant title: Une exposition de peinture réunissant certains peintres qui mettraient la peinture en question.

In 1970 at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne he took part in another exhibition entitled Processi di pensiero visualizzato (Processes of Visualized Thought), which asserted the coexistence of painting with other aspects of contemporaneity, such as conceptual art, arte povera, land art, etc...

Since that time to now, for about forty years without interruptions, he worked and he works in Turin.

His paintings have been shown in about 150 solo exhibitions, and in a large number of group exhibitions, in public and private spaces, in Europe and abroad.

Just remembering some of the most important solo exhibitions of the last years:


 * 2001 UNO | Opere 1968/1973 and DUE | Rosa e violetto 2001 at GAM (Galleria civica d'Arte Moderna e contemporanea) in Turin,
 * 2010 Canone Aureo | Golden ratio at MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome,
 * 2012 Fragments 1968-2012 at Casey Kaplan gallery di New York, chiusa a causa dell'Hurricane Sandy e riaperta in una nuova versione nel gennaio 2013.

His works have been included in several private an museum collections.