Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to Fondazione Giorgio Griffa.
Summer 69. Giorgio Griffa
Up to 2.07.2026
A young Giorgio Griffa, wearing paint-stained trousers, bends over a large white sheet suspended between two cables, in the rarefied silence of an empty room. It is an August afternoon in 1969, and the setting is the Galleria Sperone in Turin, not yet open to the public. Here, the artist meets Paolo Mussat Sartor and Gian Enzo Sperone for the first time, in a moment suspended between experience and revelation.
The exhibition Summer 69, on view until July 2 at the Fondazione Giorgio Griffa, celebrates the artist’s ninetieth birthday by returning to this original, intimate, and decisive episode. A selection of photographs by Mussat Sartor welcomes the visitor. These images do more than document—they retain the atmosphere of those days: the concentration of the gesture, the almost playful lightness of the painterly act, at the moment when Griffa’s research reaches a new awareness.
With his ever-present cigarette between his lips and brushes tucked into his belt, the artist refines his language. Lines, segments, and imprints—made with sponge, brush, or sometimes the thumb—form a primary, essential, and shared alphabet. The canvases, often raw and freed from the stretcher, receive color without hierarchy, between the last uses of oil paint and the emergence of acrylic. The ten historical works on display, created between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, convey the intensity of this transitional phase.
The close dialogue between photographs and works allows viewers to grasp the density of that creative moment, where the time of the painterly act and that of its memory overlap. Concluding the exhibition are eight canvases produced in the first months of 2026, reactivating the same tension and revealing a practice that, more than half a century later, continues to question space, time, and the very meaning of painting. Finally, two new photographs by Mussat Sartor present Griffa today, in his studio—a return marked not by celebration, but by a quiet and persistent sense of continuity.
– Text by Guia Agazzi
