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Giorgio Griffa at Casey Kaplan is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik

Casual Cool

The Daily Pic: The Italian artist made abstraction loosen up.

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(Photo by Jean Vong, courtesy Giorgio Griffa and Casey Kaplan, NY)
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This is “Obliquo giallo” ("Yellow Angle") painted in 1971 by the Italian Giorgio Griffa and now at Casey Kaplan, in Griffa’s first American show in four decades. There’s a really lovely casualness about this – the painting’s meant to be folded for storage – that has echoes of Richard Tuttle’s sculptures. What I like about Griffa’s work, however, is that it seems to start in the world of “serious”, unsmiling Greenbergian abstraction, and then let its hair down.

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