To celebrate the 90th birthday of Italian artist Ezio Gribaudo, the Italian Program at Texas Tech University Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures (CMLL) will host an exhibition next month featuring select paintings from 1957 to 2015. 

The exhibition, “Ezio Gribaudo: Life and Art”, will open with a reception at 5 p.m. Oct. 2 in the Qualia Room of the CMLL building. It will then be open from 10 am to 4:40 pm daily beginning Oct. 4-30, except Oct. 14.

A painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Ezio Gribaudo was born in 1929 in Turin, Italy, where he lives and works. His award-winning production has been recognized with various international prizes, including the XXXIII Venice Biennale Prize (1966). As an art publisher, he has worked with notable artists and personalities such as Francis Bacon, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Willem De Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, and Joan Miró. Gribaudo’s work can be seen in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

“Ezio Gribaudo: Life and Art” is one of the several 2019 exhibitions that celebrate Gribaudo’s 90th birthday this year, in a series of events coordinated by the Gribaudo Archives in Turin. The Lubbock exhibition is curated by Victoria Surliuga, associate professor of Italian in CMLL, whose book “Ezio Gribaudo: The Man in the Middle of Modernism” (2016) won first place at the Texas Tech President’s Faculty Book Award 2017-2018.

This is the third Gribaudo exhibition that Professor Surliuga has curated in Lubbock. Previously, she has curated “Ezio Gribaudo: A Lifetime in Art” at the Texas Tech University Library in 2018 and “Ezio Gribaudo’s Theaters of Memory” at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in 2016.

While visiting Lubbock in 2016, Gribaudo was awarded The Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles’ Lifetime Achievement Award and honorary citizenship from the City of Lubbock. He generously gifted CMLL a painting from his renowned series, “Theaters of Memory.”

Related materials will be available for sale during the reception. Space is limited and reservations are required. To RSVP, email [email protected].