GIORGIO GRIFFA
RICCARDO GUARNERI

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

FEBRUARY 14 - MAY 7, 2023

ABOUT KROMYA

KROMYA ART GALLERY was founded in 2018 in Lugano by Tecla Riva, Giorgio Ferrarin and Adriano A. Sala as a result of a long-standing common passion and expertise. In 2020 KROMYA expanded its headquarters with a new outpost in Verona, Italy.

On February 14, 2023, the KROMYA Art Gallery in Lugano inaugurated the exhibition Giorgio Griffa, Riccardo Guarneri. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET, a double solo exhibition dedicated to artists Giorgio Griffa and Riccardo Guarneri, leading exponents of the Analytical Painting artistic movement, to which the Gallery has always paid great attention.

The exhibition title, WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET, refers to a current pictorial research that has been able to evolve over the last fifty years while remaining faithful to its roots. The works are highly analytical, punctual, and precise, without interpretation: what you see is what it is. 

The exhibition includes about forty works created from the 1960s to present day. Giorgio Griffa and Riccardo Guarneri, invited by Christine Macel, also participated in the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2017), with a room dedicated to them.

Griffa and Guarneri, in different ways, were part of what art history has recently defined as Analytical Painting, which has also been called Painting Painting, New Painting, or Pure Painting.

Analytical Painting opposes the art ideology of the previous decade by placing the artwork itself at the center, not the system around it, which generates a radical new point of view. The atmosphere is one of deep restlessness and rooted individualism, with no hierarchies or critical gurus. The truths of the previous decade are discarded: the uncertainty of the result, the permanent doubt, and the deviation from a linear path remain some salient factors of an experience that opposes any doctrinal aspect. Practice is accompanied by theory. The work becomes a sort of logbook and a description in progress of its own work that loses its aura to become a practice. All this has made Analytical Painting very peculiar, so much so as to be defined as a movement/non-movement. By taking on the theories of Nietzsche and Heidegger, the Seventies eroded the unitary conception of history, thus opening the doors to a new era ahead of some Postmodernism and Transavantgarde principles.

The exhibition includes about forty works created from the 1960s to present day. Giorgio Griffa and Riccardo Guarneri, invited by Christine Macel, also participated in the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2017), with a room dedicated to them.

Griffa and Guarneri indicated a new path in art: one in which art and artists were freed from informal rhetoric, abstract academism, and minimalist dogma. This was the silent revolution of the Seventies, where painting was understood as a means and no longer as an end, to regain a language and a renewed creativity, where the artifact recovered its role, as well as the operational process.

GIORGIO GRIFFA - RICCARDO GUARNERI
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

FEBRUARY 14 - MAY 7, 2023

ABOUT KROMYA

KROMYA ART GALLERY was founded in 2018 in Lugano by Tecla Riva, Glorgio Ferrarin and Adriano A. Sala as a result of a long-standing common passion and expertise. In 2020 KROMYA expanded its headquarters with a new outpost.in Verona, Italy.