The “Weight of the Concrete” marks the primary monographic exhibition of Ezio Gribaudo (Turin, 1929-2022) in Austria. It serves as a complete homage to his multifaceted profession, providing an in depth exploration of his roles as each artist and writer. The exhibition borrows its identify from Il Peso del Concreto (1968), a seminal ebook that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic work alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola. According to his interdisciplinary method, this exhibition explores Gribaudo’s idiosyncratic oeuvre, his poetics of matter, and the complicated relationship he developed between picture and language. Gribaudo’s work is then carried into the current by a scenography designed by the Italian artist Davide Stucchi.

On the middle of “The Weight of the Concrete” are the Logogrifi, Gribaudo’s emblematic collection that he developed from the Nineteen Sixties onward. All through his life, the Logogrifi have articulated a deep entanglement together with his actions as a bookmaker, in addition to his fascination for brand new industrial printing processes, typefaces, language video games, and reduction matrices. Grounded in linguistic or visible riddles, the Logogrifi are akin to logogriphs or puzzles that contain the formation of recent phrases by permuting their preliminary letter. In Gribaudo’s interpretation, a Logogrifo oscillates between legibility and abstraction, at instances verging towards readable varieties and at others scaling the enigmatic world the place picture and language coalesce.

“The Weight of the Concrete” explores Gribaudo’s distinct poetic repertoire of varieties—encompassing textual, figurative, and topographic parts, but invariably disconnected from their provenance—which heralds the emergence of a brand new grammar and, consequently, novel types of studying. Beginning with achromatic embossments on blotting paper, remodeling into picket and polystyrene reliefs, and finally culminating in vividly chromatic items utilizing typographic ink, the works persistently interrogate the methods during which type, language, and matter proceed to form and redefine each other. This transformation not solely challenges conventional modalities of readership and notion, but additionally progressively slows down and intensifies the viewer’s expertise, shifting it from an train in deciphering the achromatic nature of the web page to a vibrant and colourful encounter. This relentless experiment with printing applied sciences was sparked by his dedication to publishing artist monographs, that includes contemporaries corresponding to Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, and Wifredo Lam, in addition to his curiosity in standard print codecs like newspapers, dictionaries, atlases, and youngsters’s books. To emphasise this non-hierarchical relationship between his creative work and publishing actions, the exhibition’s ultimate chapter presents a novel collection of Gribaudo’s uncommon publications and archival supplies.

“The Weight of the Concrete” gathers these graphic and poetic operations with the help of Davide Stucchi’s spontaneous gestures and conceptual responses. Drawing from Stucchi’s longstanding follow of utilizing ready-made objects and industrially produced supplies, his scenography displays a mutual fascination for the economic copy and repurposing of standardized supplies. Working on the intersection of visible arts, design, trend, and scenography, Stucchi’s interventions echo and amplify Gribaudo’s interdisciplinary physique of labor.

“The Weight of the Concrete” will probably be complemented by two namesake publications. The primary, which will probably be launched alongside the opening at Grazer Kunstverein, will showcase photographic excerpts from Gribaudo’s achromatic embossed Logogrifi books (1965-1972), uniquely complemented with an intervention by Stucchi. The second publication displays the editorial premise of Gribaudo’s and Spatola’s Il Peso del Concreto (1968). It revisits and reimagines this publication and the archive of its making, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a brand new collection of historic and modern concrete and experimental poetry. It is going to additionally embody essays elucidating the interaction between language, matter, and their poetic interconnections. Printed by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein, it’s scheduled for launch in the summertime of 2024.

Curated by
Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal

at Grazer Kunstverein
till March 2, 2024