The Italian artist Grazia Varisco (*1937) belonged to a generation of young artists who in the early 1960s strived through their work to keep abreast of the developments in science and technology in a modern industrial society. Taking as their parameters space, time and motion, they developed a sober, objective art that everyone could comprehend, and that bade farewell to the personal, subjective outpourings that had characterised abstract expressionism. This investigation into the dynamics of their own times was also at the heart of Gruppo T in Milan, which Grazia Varisco joined as its fifth member in 1960. The material pictures, objects and kinetic works that Grazia Varisco has created for over five decades convey not only a great joy in experimentation, but also her constant inventiveness when she turns her attention to a great diversity of materials, such as industrial glass, aluminium, Plexiglas, neon tubes, and even wood, paper and cardboard. Her intensive study of the relationship between light and shade, as well as space and time, constantly addresses the interaction between the work and the beholder, the relativity of appearances, and the disruption of learnt ways of seeing.
Now for the first time in Germany, this show gives a clear overview of Grazia Varisco’s wide-ranging oeuvre.