Ezio Gribaudo's work as an artist and publisher is retraced at the Museion. Also on display are his Logogrifi

From March 23 to September 1, 2024 Museion - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, traces the artistic activity of Ezio Gribaudo (Turin, Italy, 1929-2022), an artist and publisher from Turin, with the exhibition The Weight of the Concrete, curated by Tom Engelse and Lilou Vidal in collaboration with Leonie Radine. The exhibition is produced by the Grazer Kunstverein in collaboration with the Archivio Gribaudo in Turin and Museion. The Weight of the Concrete is meant to be a comprehensive tribute to Ezio Gribaudo’s multifaceted career, both as an artist and as a publisher. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from 1968’s The Weight of the Concrete, a seminal book featuring Gribaudo’s early graphic works, along with an anthology of concrete poetry edited by poet Adriano Spatola. The centerpiece of the exhibition will then be the emblematic series of Logogrifi that the artist developed beginning in the 1960s, moving from reliefs on blotting paper to reliefs in wood and polystyrene.

Founded on language or visual puzzles, the Logogryphs are similar to riddles or puzzles that require the creation of new words by changing the initial letter. According to Gribaudo, a Logogryph oscillates between legibility and abstraction, sometimes toward legible forms, other times plunging into the enigmatic world where image and language intermingle. Encompassing typographic elements (textual, figurative, and topographic), the exhibition heralds the emergence of a new grammar and new forms of reading. Starting with achromatic reliefs on blotting paper, transforming into reliefs in wood and polystyrene, and finally culminating in chromatic pieces with typographic ink, the works in the exhibition interrogate the ways in which form, language, and matter continue to shape and redefine each other. Gribaudo’s experiments with printmaking stemmed from his passion for monographs by artists such as Francis Bacon, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, and Lucio Fontana, as well as popular printmaking such as newspapers, dictionaries, atlases, and children’s books. The exhibition displays a unique selection of Gribaudo’s publications and archival materials to highlight this link between his artistic and publishing activities. The exhibition set design was curated by Italian artist Davide Stucchi, an expert in visual arts, design, fashion and set design. His artistic approach relates to and amplifies Gribaudo’s, using ready-made objects and industrial materials. The exhibition also includes a sound program that focuses on the vocalization of experimental poetry, to explore from a new perspective Gribaudo’s combinations of visual art, poetry, printmaking and design. The sound works are by Tomaso Binga, CAConrad, Bryana Fritz, Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Katalin Ladik, Hanne Lippard, Nat Marcus and Patrizia Vicinelli.

The Weight of the Concrete will be accompanied by a publication that reinterprets The Weight of Concrete (1968) by Gribaudo and Spatola, merging Gribaudo’s work with a new anthology of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry. Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein, it is scheduled for release in the summer of 2024.

Image: Ezio Gribaudo, Logogrifo (1969; Ezio Gribaudo, The Weight of the Concrete, in Davide Stucchi’s set at Grazer Kunstverein, 2023). Courtesy of Archivio Gribaudo, Davide Stucchi and Grazer Kunstverein. Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com.

Ezio Gribaudo's work as an artist and publisher is retraced at the Museion. Also on display are his Logogrifi

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