Laura Grisi

Laura Grisi’s work has always been considered part of Italian Pop Art, though even from the outset she has actually gone beyond that category, promptly intercepting various lines of international artistic research and applying them in her own original synthesis. From her debut in 1964 to 1968, Grisi’s work featured elements derived from the art of the first half of the 1960s, when economic affluence was prompting artists to simulate a society of consumption, borrowing objects, images and media (in Pop Art), or analyzing the capacity of new technologies to influence perception (in Optical Art and Kinetic-Programmed Art), while also absorbing the modular, geometric aspects of industrial production, the absence of subjective-manual intervention (in Minimal Art). On the other hand, however, Grisi’s work already included elements belonging to the research conducted in Italy and abroad in the second half of the 1960s, when a phase of economic recession led artists to view the society of consumption as alienating, and therefore to attempt to restore an atrophied creative potential to every individual, making them the protagonists of a dematerialized, de-aestheticized and theatrical art (in the temporary actions and site-specic installations characteristic of Arte Povera and Process Art). “Your work, from the beginning, has presented a certain ‘theatricality,’ [...] the places discovered by your works are more like expeditions into the artificial, into fiction.” Germano Celant