The State Hermitage Museum - St. Petersburg (Russia) | Stefania Brugnaletti

On 16 May, 2008 at Halls 339 – 342 of the Winter Palace a new exhibit opened featuring optical and kinesthetic art. The show is a continuation of sorts relating to an earlier exhibition titled Italian Kinetic Movement, organized at the State Hermitage Museum in 2006. Displayed are 40 works by GRAV artists (from the French Group de Recherche d’Art Visual – Group of Visual Arts Research), collected from museum and private collections and encompassing half a century of creativity.

The GRAV group was formed in France in 1960, at a time when the dominant, mainstream visual arts trends were pop-art and op-art ("optical-art"). Its members experimented mainly in the field of optical and kinesthetic art.

Their manifesto, Enough Mystification (1961), proclaimed: “There shall never be works of art intended to be perceived solely by the cultured eye, by the sensitive eye, by the intellectual eye, by the aesthete eye or the amateur eye. It is the human eye that shall be our reference point”. Their focus on the human eye as an organ of perception - one that reacts and responds to optical illusions without conscious interpretation - led these young artists to attempt the creation of a genuinely universal art, one they believed could be appreciated and understood by anybody regardless of ethnicity, nationality, aesthetic taste or level of education.

Horacio Garcia Rossi, GRAV’s leading figure, succeeded in introducing actual light and motion into his works. Starting in the late 1970s, Rossi devoted himself to researching the interaction of light and colour, resulting in a new artistic medium that he called Couleur lumiere ("Colour-light"), the main "subject" of a series of his works from that time.

Horacio Garcia Rossi and GRAV. The Geometry of Imaginary Space was organized by the State Hermitage Museum together with Il Cigno Galileo Galilei Publishers (Rome, Italy) under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Italian Republic in Saint Petersburg and the Consulate General of the Italian Republic in Saint Petersburg. The exhibition is overseen by N.B. Demina, Junior Research Associate of the Department of Western European Art of the State Hermitage Museum.