Victor Grippo

Victor Grippo (1936 – 2002) was the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina. He studied chemistry at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata and art at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes and had his first solo exhibition in 1966. In 1970, he joined the Grupo CAYC and began work on his series ‘Analogías,’ which explored opposites such as art-science, nature-culture and real-artificial. The artist is widely considered to be amongst the main precursors of conceptual art in South America. His work combined organic materials and minerals with daily objects to depict natural forms of energy within a framework of scientific knowledge and his own writing and poetry. Victor Grippo’s installations and sculptures have been part of many group exhibitions: Grupo CAYC at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (1978), the biennials of São Paolo (1979, 1991, and 1998), Paris (1969), Havana (1991, 1994) and Venice (1986), and “Documenta 11,” Kassel (2002). His work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and the Palace of Fine Arts, Brussels (1995), the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) (2004), and at the Camden Arts Centre, London (2006). In 2009, Grippo had solo shows at Alexander and Bonin and Expotrastiendas, Buenos Aires. In 2011, he was included in the group exhibition “Radical Shift: Politische und soziale Umbrüche in der Kunst Argentiniens seit den 60er Jahren” at the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany.