
Title — Giorgio Griffa / Peter Robinson, Differences in kind and rhythm
Client — Te Uru Contemporary Gallery
Year — 2025
Discipline — Art direction & book design
This exhibition, curated by James Gatt, combined two disparate practices from Italian abstract painter Giorgio Griffa (Turin) and local sculptor Peter Robinson (Ngāi Tahu, Hakatere). Despite being artists of different generations, backgrounds, and contexts, Gatt saw how both Griffa and Robinson similarly use repeat forms and processes in their work to address related concepts of repetition and difference, emergence and continuum, ambitiously combining their work for the show.
After the initial meeting with the gallery the focus had to be on the installation. The uniqueness of the proposal meant that using archival installation images or stand alone shots of the individual artworks were not going to work.
As the book is part of a coninuing series (and collaboration between the studio and Te Uru) maintaining the same design system and approach was essential. The debossed text on magenta (here referencing one of Peter's felt works) for the cover as well as stock shifts between essays and installation images were obvious decisions. Unlike the previous book however, here we represented the flow of the exhibition and sequencing so that it worked exactly as it'd be experienced in the gallery. Taking the rhythm of the show and how it breaks between singular forms (lines, dashes, numerals) and objects (such as lengths of wire or die-cut felt pieces) before moving across the three floors (using the essays as break points) to eventually showcase their most recent sequencings of numbers and spiral forms on the top floor, the book introduced each floor with DPSs of the room before isolating individual works within the context.
With a sold out print run the book now lives on complimenting the much revered show.










