Victor Grippo, Analogy 1, 1970-77, mixed media installation at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1995
Victor Grippo (1936-2002) exerted a lasting influence on artists in his native Argentina and beyond. However, the Camden Arts Centre's upcoming survey of the artist will be the first large-scale exhibition of his work to be seen in London, though Grippo was previously the subject of a 1995 retrospective at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery and presented an epic installation, The Intimacy of the Light in St Ives (La intimidad de la luz en St Ives), in Cornwall in 1997. In the US, Grippo has benefited greatly from the ongoing reassessment of Conceptualism as a truly global phenomenon, and has been included in exhibitions including MOMA's 1993 show, 'Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century' and 'Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s' at the Queens Museum of Art, New York in 1999.
Originally trained as a chemist, Grippo first came to prominence as a painter and engraver in the politically turbulent Argentina of the 1950s. 1955 saw a right-wing military coup in that country, one of many in South America at that time, which overthrew the populist leader Juan Domingo Peron. But the left continued to resist their fate in the ensuing decades, and Grippo, for his part, began to create sculptures and installations that championed the working poor, celebrating trade and manual labour. Up to his death, he sustained an almost alchemical interest in workaday materials and objects, and more broadly in the eternal relation between science and art.
Echoing the plight of the world's poor, Grippo was able to instill a political resonance in domestic items such as tables, presaging the work of contemporary artists like Doris Salcedo, as well as in natural objects, and especially the potato, a recurring motif in his work. The iconic work, Analogy 1, appeared in a number of versions between 1970-77, the simplest of which exhibited, in Buenos Aires, a potato-battery that generated electricity by means of copper and zinc electrodes, and which formally relates Grippo's work to contemporaneous Arte Povera goings-on in Italy (Guiseppe Penone has also worked with potatoes). Of that work, Grippo stated: 'The potato-battery related to the generative energy of a native foodstuff that became the staple food of the poor the world over, in a certain sense the constitutive matter of the world'. Just don't call him the Argentinean Joseph Beuys.
Victor Grippo
8 December 2006 - 4 February 2007
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road
London NW3 6DG
Tel: +44 (0)20 7472 5500
www.camdenartscentre.org
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