Víctor Grippo (Junín 1936.Buenos Aires 2002)

Poetic and political, Víctor Grippo’s work was a core contribution to conceptualism in Argentina. His dual training as a chemistry and art student had led him to venture into a series of works in which aesthetic and conceptual aspirations were achieved through simple scientific procedures. The vindication of the trades was the other great theme that crossed his work. Son of an Italian bricklayer who had immigrated to Argentina, he configured a particular syntax with tables, maces, plaster and plumb lines (among other elements), to rescue the anonymous worker and revalue his figure above that of the artist understood as genius. Grippo’s work is full of ideas that find, in the elements of everyday life, a way to take shape. In 1970 he began to use the potato in his installations, one of his favorite objects and for which he developed multiple readings. Throughout his forty years of production, Grippo turned to the potato as a metaphor for the transformative force that can be found in consciousness, and also as a symbol of the nutritional capacity of the American continent. At the beginning of the 1970s he joined the so-called “Group of 13”, along with other renowned conceptual artists of his generation, and actively participated in the Center for Art and Communication (CAyC), which, directed by Jorge Glusberg, had emerged with the intention of project languages from diverse systems of thought and representation (such as architecture, computing, or biology) into artistic practices. There Grippo found a context conducive to his artistic development. Grippo’s work is that of a modern alchemist. His installations, apparently complex, aim to make evident the slow processes through which matter is transformed. In that subtle statement his small, powerful and moving emancipatory ideas are projected.