An exhibition dossier on the marine still lifes of Filippo de Pisis in Ferrara

Opening on October 28 at the Castello Estense in Ferrara and open to the public until June 2, 2022, the exhibition De Pisis. The Silence of Things, curated by Vasilij Gusella and organized by the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara and Fondazione Ferrara Arte.

This is a dossier exhibition created to introduce visitors to a new painting by Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta marina con peperoni, una melanzana e una conchiglia, which has become part of the collections of the Ferrara Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. The panel will then be placed in dialogue with a selection of oil paintings and lithographs by the same artist from Ferrara’s civic museums.

The work was acquired in March 2021 by the Ministry of Culture at the proposal of the Venice Export Office for the Gallerie dell’Accademia and granted on deposit to the Ferrara museum. The painting’s arrival in Ferrara represents an augmentation of the already substantial Depisi collection in the Este collections, which has a total of more than 250 paintings, drawings, and lithographs. Executed in 1946 during a stay of De Pisis in Venice, it is one of his most intense and lyrical marine still lif es and testifies to his highly personal mature painting style, characterized by a writing made up of rapid brush strokes, airy, delicate, rarefied. The sky and the sea are two distant stripes, while on the deserted beach, in a suspended and motionless atmosphere, vegetables and a solitary shell with rosy hues and mother-of-pearl reflections are noted.

This exhibition dossier is intended to recount one of the best-known strands of the artist’s production, that of marine still life. Compositions completed throughout the painter’s entire career, whose theme stems from the dialectic between the infinitely small (a shell, some vegetables abandoned on the sand, a snipe) and the infinitely large (the sea in the background and the sky barely marked by a few clouds). Works in which De Pisis reconciles his metaphysical reflections, matured as a result of his contacts with De Chirico and Carrà, with the attachment to the reality of feelings and things that he had developed by reading Pascoli, Govoni, Palazzeschi and Comisso.

An example of this is Natura morta con il martin pescatore (1925), in which the Pascolian theme of remembrance is depicted, while in the mysterious and suspended atmospheres of Socrates’ Onions and the marine still lifes, made between 1927 and 1932, the poet-painter reconsiders his personal relationship with the metaphysics of De Chirico, whom he met in Ferrara in 1915.

Completing the exhibition are seven lithographs made by De Pisis between 1945-46 to accompany some of his poems.

For more info: www.castelloestense.it

Hours: Daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.

Image: Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta marina con peperoni, una melanzana e una conchiglia (1946; oil on panel, 45 x 55 cm; Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, on deposit at the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Ferrara). By concession of the Ministry of Culture.

An exhibition dossier on the marine still lifes of Filippo de Pisis in Ferrara

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