Laura Grisi: the Measuring of Time

Book excerpt: On the many lives and mediums of a postwar Italian artist-adventurer Published on the occasion of her long-deserved retrospective at Muzeum Susch, this book testifies to the singular vision of Italian artist Laura Grisi (1939-2017) within contemporary art history. Born in Greece, educated in Paris and living between New York and Rome, where she died, Grisi spent long periods of her life in Africa, South America and Polynesia. This involvement with non-Western cultures indelibly marked her own search for a cosmic thinking. Although her work is often reduced to Pop art, Grisi always worked within the fundamental motif of the "journey"--from remote locations visited and documented, to the multiplicity of mediums used. Grisi embodied a stateless, nomadic female subject defying the politics of identity, the univocity of representation and the unidirectionality of time. Grisi's work spans from her avant-garde Variable Paintingsof the mid-1960s and her 1970s pioneering environmental installations dealing with fog, wind and rain, to her conceptual photo-works of the 1980s.