Víctor Grippo

Grippo formed a friendship with the avant-garde Buenos Aires artist Ricardo Carreira, an affinity that suggests an interest in the as-yet-unnamed “Conceptualism”. At the end of the 1970s Grippo was linked to the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), and joined the Grupo de los 13, which together with Jorge Glugsberg proposed a local version of conceptual art that acquired the name “Systems Art”, a conceptual, ideological and regional art. In his text “System” Grippo wrote that concretion is the result of images of everyday objects that acquire a new meaning through of the modification of certain variables: “it is a question of extracting fragments of everyday life and, through this fragment or portion, resignify it by means of the alteration of its habitual context.”
 
Grippo’s apparently hermetic work contains a poetry imbued with utopia and humanism. From the mid-1960s, in line with the dematerialization process underway among the artistic avant-garde, Grippo worked with perishable materials that formed part of ephemeral installations. He applied his manual skills to a deep knowledge of materials and their reactions. His response to technical problems was not to produce sophisticated or costly mechanisms; he was more interested in crafted, rather than industrial, solutions, as a response to the lack of resources or answers in the first world: that is, a technology of poverty.  

Transformation aims to offer a broad overview of the work of Víctor Grippo, running from his early work in the 1960s until 2002. The show is organized according to a chronological but non-linear sequence, based on the idea of transformation, one of the underlying principles of his artistic practice: transformation of science into art, of matter into energy, of energy into consciousness, and of death into life.