– 255
2024
Giorgio Griffa
Hanukkah e Menorah
62 x 62,50 x 15 cm
Satin-finished iron
The artist understands the candelabrum as a symbol of Jewish identity: a synthesis of its history, its spiritual essence, and the complex interplay of joy and pain, harmony and conflict.
Beauty is conceived not as a matter of aesthetic preference, but as truth, essence, and authenticity—the antithesis of affectation, ornament, and embellishment. As in the artist’s painting, where color does not function decoratively or descriptively but asserts itself as pure color, as an element in its own right, so too this work is stripped of all superfluous detail. Bent and cut, the iron retains the visible traces of its making; matter and form become one. The lamp is reduced to the essence of what a lamp is.
Its structural logic is both expandable and contractible. The nine-branched work contains within itself—and simultaneously becomes—every other form of Jewish candelabrum: a Chanukkiah and a Menorah at once. The work thus moves beyond a specific ritual object to evoke the continuity and multiplicity of Jewish visual and spiritual memory.




