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Laura Grisi: The Measuring of Time

Sala Carroponte - FM Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea - via Piranesi 10 Milano

Presentation of the first retrospective monograph dedicated to the artist edited by JRP | Editions in collaboration with Muzeum Susch

With the participation of the Curator of the Exhibition and Editor of the publication Marco Scotini, the Founder of Muzeum Susch and President of the Arts Station Foundation CH Grażyna Kulczyk, the Director of Instituto Susch and Curator Anke Kempkes, and with the Co-Author of the publication Valérie Da Costa.

Milan, 29 November 2021. On the occasion of the exhibition Laura Grisi. The Measuring of Time – ongoing until 5 December 2021 at Muzeum Susch in Engadin– Muzeum Susch and JRP | Editions present The Measuring of Time, the first retrospective monograph dedicated to the artist who died in 2017, at FM Centro per l'arte contemporanea in Milan on Monday 29 November at 6pm.

The preview presentation of the publication will be attended by the Founder of Muzeum Susch and President of the Board of Directors of Art Stations Foundation CH Grażyna Kulczyk, the Director of Instituto Susch, art historianand curator Anke Kempkes, curator of the exhibition and publication Marco Scotini, and art historian, critic, curator and professor of Strasbourg University Valérie Da Costa. The publication is scheduled to be released in Europe starting from December 2021 and in America from February 2022.

The presentation will premiere the Laura Grisi exhibition film by Swiss documentary film maker Claudio von Planta produced by Muzem Susch. In a panel discussion the themes of this first retrospective monograph and the current new survey show in Switzerland - both organised in collaboration with the Laura Grisi Archive in Rome and P420 Gallery in Bologna - will be explored. Both new formats reintroduce Laura Grisi’s outstanding oeuvre to the contemporary audiences illustrating the genuinely experimental practice and the highly innovative vision of the Italian postwar/neo-avant-garde artist.

The Measuring of Time collects extensive documentation on the multifaceted practice, research and numerous travels of the artist in the 60s and 70s. Although her work has mostly been “reduced” to Italian Pop art — if not entirely overlooked — from the outset Grisi worked beyond that category, pertinently intercepting various lines of international artistic research and applying them in her own original synthesis. Within an activity whose fundamental motif is the “journey”, Laura Grisi embodies a stateless and nomadic female subject who defies the politics of identity, the univocity of representation, and the unidirectionality of time.

The Measuring of Time, curated by Marco Scotini, presents essays by Marco Scotini, Harvard University Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies Giuliana Bruno, art historian, critic, curator and professor of Strasbourg University Valérie Da Costa, art critic Martin Herbert, and former Muzeum Susch Artistic Director Krzysztof Kosciuczuk. The publication also includes the reprint of a seminal interview with Laura Grisi by Germano Celant realized in 1990.

LAURA GRISI. THE MEASURING OF TIME

EDITORS: Clément Dirié, Marco Scotini
AUTHOR: Germano Celant, Krzysztof Kosciuczuk, Laura Grisi, Marco Scotini, Martin Herbert, Valérie Da Costa, Giuliana Bruno
CATEGORIES: Books, Monographs & Artist’s Books

SPECIFICATIONS: English
Publication: December 2021
ISBN: 978-3-03764-566-6
Hardcover, 240 x 170 mm
Pages: 272

Pictures B&W: 70 / Colour: 150
Price: CHF 38, EUR 35, GBP 30, USD 40

Born in Rhodes, Greece, in 1939, educated in Paris, and living between New York and Rome where she died in 2017, Laura Grisi spent long periods of her life in Africa, South America, and Polynesia. This involvement with cultures beyond those of the Western world was destined to indelibly mark her own experiences in the search for a cosmic thinking or “science of the concrete” (Levi-Strauss). Despite making photography the original method of her research in the early 1960s, she subsequently moved to “Variable Paintings” in the mid-1960s (with sliding panels and neon tubes). By the end of the 1960s she was creating dynamic, environmental installations in which she artificially reproduced natural phenomena such as fog, wind, and rain, before ultimately arriving at a descriptive, verbal form and mathematical language as a conceptual tool in the 1970s and 1980s, in order to explore the mechanics of human perception and knowledge. Grisi’s entire body of work strives to take into account the breadth, multiplicity, imperceptibility, and infinite proliferation of all that is possible, but starts out from precise constraints, from paradoxical gaps, from linguistic and semiotic limitations, in accordance with an approach that is close to the Nouveau Roman, to Nouvelle Vague cinema, and the French Oulipo group.

During her lifetime, Laura Grisi exhibited at the Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan, in 1965; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, from 1973; the Van Abbemuseum Museum, Eindhoven, in 1976; and Konrad Fischer Gallery, Düsseldorf, from 1978. Her work was included in 1966 at the XXXIII Biennale di Venezia and the group exhibition Italy New Tendencies at Gallerie Bonino, New York; in 1968 in Young Italians at the ICA, Boston, and the Jewish Musem, New York, and Teatro delle Mostre at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome.

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