Consistently through variation

The hand, the eye, the brain, the heart, the brush lay color onto the canvas.
They fix the identity of that mark.
The atoms of color and fabric embrace in a new life.
Endless movement, photons of light enter that mark and emerge colored.
The spaces of silence between one mark and another shape becoming, just as in music.

(Giorgio Griffa, 2025)

Casey Kaplan is pleased to present Giorgio Griffa: Consistently through variation, the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery. Bringing together more than 20 works produced over the past five decades, the exhibition offers a focused yet expansive survey of Griffa’s practice, highlighting his sustained commitment to painting as an open, exploratory process rather than a fixed outcome. Across time, his work reveals a balance between continuity and change, where repetition becomes a site of renewal.

Central to Griffa’s approach is an understanding of painting as a temporal act—one that unfolds through gesture, rhythm, and interruption. His canvases, often left unstretched and marked by visible beginnings and pauses, emphasize process over completion. Variation emerges not as deviation, but as a natural extension of a consistent inquiry into line, color, and sequence. Each work stands as both an independent statement and part of a larger, ongoing conversation within the artist’s oeuvre.

Seen together, the works in Consistently through variation underscore Griffa’s belief in painting as a living language, capable of infinite modulation while remaining grounded in a coherent visual logic. The exhibition traces how, over decades, subtle shifts in form and structure generate new meanings, affirming Griffa’s position as a key figure in postwar abstraction whose practice continues to evolve through attentive repetition and sustained reflection.