Sperone Westwater, New York
September 5  – October 26, 2019

Giorno’s earliest silkscreened works reconcile Buddhist spiritual texts with a Pop sensibility. His well-known text paintings of recent decades, executed in the trademark font Mark Michaelson developed for him in 1984, feature curt and contradictory messages excerpted from his poetry—imperative, deadpan, sacred, profane. The exhibition includes the largest paintings Giorno has yet made, four-part compositions each measuring nearly ten feet square, with phrases such as “DO THE UNDONE” suspended on silkscreened rainbow backgrounds. Upstairs is a suite of watercolors in pale blue, registering the traces of the artist’s hand, weightless in contrast to the crisp perfection of the paintings.

For the first time in the United States, Giorno presents three new sculptures, found bluestone boulders into which poetic phrases are carved. Similar works were shown in 2017 at the Château de Versailles outside Paris as part of “Voyage d’hiver,” an exhibition organized by the Palais de Tokyo. With their ironic clash of immaterial language and solid substance, these “stone poems” play with issues of transience and permanence, the text fragments appearing as chance apparitions.

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