LAURA GRISI

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-specific installations characteristic of Arte Povera and Process Art). [...] Precisely in response to the oppression and incommunicability of the mass society, in1967 and 1968 many artists in Italy and elsewhere proposed a return to the primal, vital elements of nature (just consider Arte Povera). Grisi immediately intercepted this new experimentation, developing the _Natural Elements _series starting in 1968, of installation/works that artificially reproduce atmospheric phenomena. [... ] With respect to the tautological-objectual and mythical- ancestral use of natural elements implemented by Arte Povera, Grisi presents nature as a mental, technologized. [... ] The particular character of the research of Grisi, from then on, lies in the equal presence of the technological- scientific and aesthetic-perceptive components.”

Text courtesy P420.