Fair: Art Basel 2024, Basel

For the Feature sector of Art Basel 2024, Sans titre presents a solo exhibition by Italian artist Ezio Gribaudo (1929 – 2022), a seminal figure in the Turin art scene.

The presentation is conceived as a reconstruction of Gribaudo’s legendary studio on Via Palladio in Turin, featuring several museum-quality works that appeared at the time on the walls of this workplace, which he occupied until the mid-1970s. Designed as a place to accommodate, discuss, and present his works on paper and lithographs, this atelier, where all the important figures of the artistic scene of his time convened, was a place of conviviality and exchange. It was also the site of his immense career as an art publisher, during which he published hundreds of books of the artists of the XX century. The booth seeks to reproduce the warm, captivating atmosphere that characterized this place of work and life.

Ezio Gribaudo began a career as an artist while simultaneously pursuing activities dedicated to typography, printing and publishing. In 1955, he worked as a draftsman in the famed Fonderia Nebiolo and developed his taste for typography and printing machines, as well as the new technologies which characterized this flourishing industry.
The relationship between the image and the printed text is physically perceived throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Ezio Gribaudo’s first Logogrifi are the fruit of his activity as a publisher, and of his fascination with new industrial printing processes (monotype and linotype) and with typographic characters and relief matrices.
These works of great rigor and graphic sobriety - awarded prizes in the Graphic Arts section of the Venice Biennale in 1966 and at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1967 - thwart the rational rules of the universe from which they derive. Produced using an embossing system on blotting paper following the pressed imprint of a zinc matrix, they maintain a poetic ambiguity through the original and anachronistic arrangement of an associative process of typographic forms deriving from diverse sources (newspapers, dictionaries, architecture books, geography books, children’s books, etc.).
For Art Basel 2024, Sans titre presents a series of twelve Logogrifi colorati, hung one after the other, as they were in the studio on Via Palladio. Some of these pieces are being presented to the public for the first time since the 1970s. The presentation will be enhanced by a polystyrene Logogrifo, from the same series which was on view in two recent and major retrospectives at the Grazer Kunstverein (December 2023 – March 2024) and at Museion Bolzano (until September 2024).

The entirety of Ezio Gribaudo’s oeuvre evolves in parallel with his role an editor, publisher and supporter of the artists of his time. In 1963 he began to collaborate with Fabbri Editions and realized many monographs by artists of the international avant-garde (Le Grande Monografie). In 1968, Gribaudo designed a series of paintings in homage to De Chirico, who never ceased to fascinate the artist and publisher. Struck by the modular aspect of Chirico’s work (which proceeded through repetition of a motif), Gribaudo produced a Pop Art rereading of the work of the master of metaphysical painting, thereby anticipating the homage Warhol would pay him in 1982. Gribaudo’s friendship with De Chirico and a deep knowledge of his work became the fruit of new experiments.
For Art Basel 2024, Sans titre also presents an iconic work from Gribaudo’s series of tributes to De Chirico, similar to that which hung on the wall of his studio on Via Palladio, as evidenced by the 1974 photo.

The booth is conceived as a moment suspended in time in the heart of the fair. Visitors are invited to consult some of the most important volumes published by Ezio Gribaudo, within a faithful reconstruction of the artist’s atelier, uniting artworks, books, designed furniture and objects.

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Ezio Gribaudo (1929 – 2022) was an artist and art publisher who lived and worked in Turin. He was trained in arts at the Academy of Brera in Milan, and later at Turin Polytechnic Faculty of Architecture.

Gribaudo’s artistic production has been awarded a number of prestigious international prizes, among which, the 9th Rome Quadriennale (1965), as well as the Graphic Arts Prize at the 33rd Venice Biennale (1966) and at the 9th São Paulo Art Biennial (1967). In 2011, he was invited to participate in the Italian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale.

A retrospective of his work is currently on view at Museion - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, in a scenography by Davide Stucchi until September 2024. Gribaudo has had solo shows at Galleria d’Arte La Bussola, Turin (1959); Galleria Viotti, Turin (1968); Galleria Schwarz, Milan (1967-1972); Galerie de France, Paris (1968); Kunstverein Göttingen (1971); Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne, Geneva (1971); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (1973); Marlborough Graphics Gallery, London (1974); David Hockney / Ezio Gribaudo, Galleria Michaud, Florence (1974); Nakhamkin Fine Arts Gallery, New York (1981); Galleria d’Arte Moderna Toninelli, Rome (1982); Italian Cultural Institute, New York (2013); Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome (2015); Pinacoteca Albertina, Turin (2016); Biblioteca Nazionale, Turin (2018); Casa Museo Jorn, Albissola Marina / Museo della Ceramica, Mondovi (2019); Etablissement d’en face, Brussels (2019); Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, Turin (2019); The Bahrain National Museum, Bahrain (2020); Sans titre, Paris (2022 & 2024); Grazer Kunstverein (2023).

Ezio Gribaudo’s works are featured in the permanent collections of important institutions and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Museum of Imagination, Hudson, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Ca’ Pesaro, Venice; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Modern Art, Eilat; The Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne, Geneva; The National Gallery, Prague; Maison de la Culture et des Loisirs, Saint-Étienne; Fondazione Fiera Milano, Milan; Kunstverein Gottingen; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Pinacoteca Albertina, Turin; G.A.M. Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, Turin; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Spoleto; Accademia di Belle Arti, Catania.