GGrippo: bridge2hot, 2005, Light-jet print on Di Bond, 37 3/4" x 37 3/4" / Photo © GGrippo
Tom Felber for creative face Magazine
Gabriel Grippo a.k.a. GGrippo is an Argentine-born artist, designer and cultural activist. Educated in the fine arts and architecture in Argentina and trained in the design industry in the US, he works in clothing, furniture and interior design, photography and installation art. He lives and works in Brooklyn/NY where he runs nydesignroom, a design retail and gallery space. The nydesignroom is the idea of three architects working and collaborating in various design fields: fashion, architecture and object/furniture design. Founded in 2001 by partners GGrippo, Werner Morath and Maria Montenegro, nydesignroom is committed to foster emerging design talent. Three years before founding nydesignroom GGrippo already started to conceive and produce multidisciplinary events like FASHIONLAB or Firstop: Williamsburg Design Weekend.
As an artist and curator GGrippo works around the cultural phenomenon of fashion, its influences and relationship with design, photography and art installations. At present he works on an exhibition about Dutch artists for the 400 years anniversary of New Amsterdam.
Two years ago GGrippo finished his project Brooklyn, an installation of digitally manipulated photographs within a space that virtually recreates the original urban landscape. In the process of altering the original color photographs to suit the image an industrial and contemporary cityscape he looked into the work of notorious New York-based artists like Warhol, Rauschenberg and Basquiat. The selection of saturated colors was made to represent the vibrant life of the Brooklyn area of Williamsburg, and the juxtaposed layers of functions that co-exist in the architectural containers.
A series of 13 photographic images of existing locations around the featured Brooklyn area of Williamsburg document and re-interpret the urban space. The main intention is to show these urban corners as they appear to the artist’s eye, in bright contrasted blocks of colors, empty and filled with casual elements at the same time.§ Graffiti writings photographed separately are incorporated in the compositions as another element that is part of the urban vision, usually in the form of clouds they are reformulated as an architectural element. These iconic images are named 'Kentave' , 'watertank', 'bridge2hot', etc, to simply refer to the actual place where the experience of recognizing happened to the artist. The pieces in Brooklyn are also intended to expose the great influence of street culture in design and art.
GGrippo’s works have been widely shown in galleries and museums in the US, Europe and South America such as Eyebeam Atelier, White Columns, Roebling Hall, BAC (Brooklyn Arts Council), Burodijkstra Art Gallery, MALBA (Museum of Latinamerican Art), Dabbah-Torrejon Arte Contemporaneo, CayC (Centro de Arte y Comunicacion). He has recently completed an artist residency at Museumquartier Vienna.
