Victor Grippo

(Junín, 1936- Buenos Aires, 2002)

An artist recognized for his contributions to conceptual art, Grippo's work, apparently hermetic, exposes a poetics full of utopia and humanism.
The idea of transformation underlies his artistic practice, a regeneration inherent to nature and its alchemical power that permeates his first sculptures and installations. Since the mid-sixties, in tune with the process of dematerialization of the artistic avant-garde, Grippo worked with perishable materials that were part of ephemeral installations. He joined the group CAYC (Art and Communication Center) and began his Analogies series with works that work on traditional oppositions such as art-science, nature-culture and real-artificial. In 1972, within the framework of the Art and Ideology exhibition, he carried out his public intervention Construction of a popular oven to make bread in Plaza Roberto Arlt, in collaboration with Jorge Gamarra, artist, and A. Rossi, rural worker, highlighting the basic processes of cooperation, production and food and reflecting on the city-countryside duality. His works from those years are related to conceptual art and use organic materials. In 1980 he presented Life, Death, Resurrection, a germination of beans that destroys the sealed lead containers that contain it. Among his individual exhibitions we can mention those held at Galería Artemúltiple, Buenos Aires (1976, 1980); Raquel Arnaud Art Cabinet, São Paulo (1984); the San Telmo Foundation, Buenos Aires (1988); Fawbush Projects, New York (1991); Carrillo Gil Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City (1994); his retrospective at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1995); and Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery, Buenos Aires (2001). Of his numerous individual exhibitions, the following stand out: Tokyo (1980), Venice (1986) and Havana (1991, 1994) and the Documenta Kassel (2002). The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); Art from Argentina 1920-1994, The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1994); Out of Actions: Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s 1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York (1999); Art in Action, Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (1999); Art and Politics in the '60s, Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires (2002).
Tiempo (1991) was part of the exhibitions of the banquet_metabolism and communication project of Medialab Mad. Use potatoes to represent the metabolic process of transferring energy from an analog state to an energetic state or, as in this case, to a digital state. When death comes, organic life is transformed into an idea, it becomes something immaterial and, therefore, freed from temporal ties.