Giorgio Griffa / Très Traits

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles highlights the resonance of Van Gogh’s oeuvre in contemporary art by means of temporary exhibitions and a wide-ranging schedule of events.

Two new exhibitions and a video open our programme for 2016. The group exhibition Très Traits and the solo show of Giorgio Griffa (*1936, Turin), whose eloquent and consistent oeuvre has been rediscovered in recent years, invite us to dialogue with works of art in which line is both the place and the living and vibrant sign of the creative thought and pictorial act.

A photograph by Andreas Gursky, which zooms in on Vincent van Gogh’s painting Wheatfield with Reaper, is the starting point of the exhibition Très Traits, featuring works by seven well-known artists: Christopher Wool, Eugène Leroy, Silvia Bächli, Adrian Ghenie, Isabelle Cornaro, Roy Lichtenstein and Andreas Gursky. By taking line as the basis of their works, these artists free themselves from certain rhetorical shortcuts and clichés associated with 20th and 21st-century painting.

On the second floor, the raw canvases by Giorgio Griffa—created “by the brush, by my hand, the paint, my concentration, etc.”—include old and new works, among them a breath-taking homage to Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), titled Canone aureo 705 (VVG) (2015).

In her film Yes, These Eyes are the Windows (2015), Saskia Olde Wolbers takes us inside the London house where Van Gogh lived. The house becomes the narrator of a fictional history that revolves around the mythification of the artist and the influence exerted by his ghostly presence on the fate of the house and its owners.

Très Traits and Giorgio Griffa are curated by Bice Curiger.
The presentation of Yes, These Eyes are the Windows by Saskia Olde Wolbers is curated by Bice Curiger and Julia Marchand.

*(1) Giorgio Griffa, Canone aureo 705 (VVG), 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 140 x 237 cm. Photo: Giulio Caresio. © the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. (2) Giorgio Griffa. Photo: Bice Curiger. (3) Andreas Gursky, Untitled XI (Van Gogh), 1999. C-print mounted on Plexiglas in artist’s frame, 275 x 200 cm. © Andreas Gursky / ADAGP, Paris, 2016. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin London. (4) Saskia Olde Wolbers, Yes These Eyes Are the Windows, 2015. HD video, 18 minutes. Voice-over: Tom Brooke. © the artist, with kind permission of Maureen Paley, London. (5) Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. © Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. © Fluor Architecture. Photo: Guillaume Avenard. (6) Silvia Bächli, Untitled, 2013. Gouache on paper, 62 x 44 cm. © Silvia Bächli. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York. (7) Adrian Ghenie, Lidless Eye, 2015. Oil on canvas, 43 x 30 cm. © Adrian Ghenie. (7) Isabelle Cornaro, Reproductions #9, 2014. Acrylic spray painting on wall. Photo: Joshua White. © ADAGP, Paris, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery. (8) Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2015. Silkscreen ink on linen, 274.3 x 198.1 cm. © Christopher Wool. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. (9) Eugène Leroy, Grand homme jaune, 1989. Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm. © ADAGP, Paris, 2016. (10) Vincent van Gogh, Undergrowth, July 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92.3 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).