Farewell to Ezio Gribaudo, artist and publisher from Turin

Ezio Gribaudo ( Turin, Italy, 1929), an artist and publisher from Turin who collaborated with Chagall, de Chirico, Fontana, Peggy Guggenheim, Miró, and Moore, died yesterday at the age of 93.

He produced volumes for Edizioni d’Arte Fratelli Pozzo, Fabbri Editori, Garzanti, Einaudi, UTET and many others. His book catalog, the thirty-four artists published under his editorship in Grandi Monografie Fabbri Editori (1966-1990), includes various entries by masters of modern art including Bacon, Botero, Burri, Duchamp, Guttuso, Manzù, and Savinio.

His activities over the years have also included promoting notable cultural events, especially in the exhibition sector. In Turin he organized an exhibition of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 1976 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna and the exhibition-show Coucou Bazar in 1978 for Jean Dubuffet at the Promotrice delle Belle Arti, organized for FIAT. In addition, Gribaudo was a collector of modern art classics, and the works he acquired include works by Calder, Carrà, Chemiakin, de Chirico, Dubuffet, Ernst, Fontana, Matta, Moore, and Tàpies.

With his artwork made in various media and mixed techniques, as well as with traditional painting tools, he moved from graphic design to sculpture and painting, with the tools of the modern printing industry later replaced with hand presses.

With the development of a functional vocabulary for his art, Gribaudo developed his work through several key themes in his career. Starting with flans and logogriphs, he added Theaters of Memory, Council symbols, skies, dinosaurs, and pyramids to his production.

The Theaters of Memory propose a study of the mnemonic arts, in which the artist orders language according to various imaginal codes to recompose the verbal signs of reality and recreate new conceptual meanings that evoke the past to be recovered. His artistic lexicon has incorporated and created a precise terminology that is attentive to all the developments that have accompanied his production.

After beginning with a figurative, non-abstract style, Gribaudo expanded his pictorial interests to include various materials and techniques. The white monochromatic paintings elaborated in typography were made with the matrices and techniques of serial reproduction with flans, scraps from the production of newspapers and editorial texts, going beyond traditional painting techniques. In the 1960s he developed logographs, typographic imprints on buvard paper, devoid of ink and embossed.

Among the various awards he has received are the IX Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome (1965), the IX São Paulo Biennale in Brazil (1967), the Pannunzio Prize (2003), the Tigullio Prize (2009) and the IIC (Italian Cultural Institute) Lifetime Achievement Award (2016). Gribaudo was awarded the Gold Medal of the Benemeriti della Cultura, presented by President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in Quirinale (2003), and was President of the Albertina Academy of Turin (2003-2005).

Ezio Gribaudo’s works can be found in numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Museum of Imagination in Hudson, New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Modern Art in Eilat, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch, the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Petit Palais Musée d’Art Moderne in Geneva, the Narodni galerie v Praze in Prague, the Maison de la Culture et des Loisirs in Saint-Étienne, the Kunstverein in Göttingen, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and the Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, both in Turin, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Spoleto, and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Catania.

Farewell to Ezio Gribaudo, artist and publisher from Turin

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