Figures Constructing a Dance

Salvatore Grippi

Master printmaker Salvatore Grippi maintained a physicality in his work that transcended whichever medium he worked with. Approaching each object or figure almost as a block of stone or wood to be chiseled, his sense of gravity and strength comes through. Grippi worked at Atelier 17 in New York in the early 1950s and used many of the innovative intaglio techniques which were developed there.

In “Figures Constructing a Dance” he has gone so far as to cut the plate to accommodate the posed figures, the locus of the composition remaining the shapes of their bodies and how they communicate with one another, their sinewy dance emphasized by the bold lift-ground and the negative space surrounding them. In this multi-technique intaglio, Grippi’s place in the formulation of fine art printmaking shines.