At the Museo Morandi, Mary Ellen Bartley's first Italian solo exhibition reinterprets the works of Giorgio Morandi

From January 31 to July 7, 2024, the Museo Morandi of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector will host the exhibition Mary Ellen Bartley: Morandi’s books, the first solo exhibition in Italy by the American photographer Mary Ellen Bartley (New York, 1959).

Curated by Alessia Masi, the exhibition is one of five special projects of the 12th edition of ART CITY Bologna that aim to explore and reinterpret the work of Giorgio Morandi through different contemporary languages on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his death.

Mary Ellen Bartley’s photographs explore the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book and its potential for abstraction. Twenty-one photographs will be presented in two rooms of the Morandi Museum that constitute the outcome of a residency the photographer held in Bologna, in the spaces of Casa Morandi, which began in May 2020, was interrupted shortly thereafter due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and then resumed in 2022. From this experience was born Morandi’s books, a photographic series of her personal compositions built with some of the books and objects that belonged to Morandi, now preserved in the house-museum in via Fondazza.

The volumes on Corot, Ingres, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Cézanne, the masters of the Bolognese painter, have become in Bartley’s photographs the silent interlocutors of her still lifes; sometimes these are placed next to objects and tin boxes. In her methodological approach, Bartley respected aspects such as light, colors and geometry so dear to Morandi to convey and emphasize those values of simplicity, silence, peace, order, meditation and reflection. Giorgio Morandi and Mary Ellen Bartley: two artists distant in time and different in their use of artistic media, but united by their search for essence and attention to simple things.

When in the spring of 2018 Mary Ellen Bartley visited Casa Morandi for the first time, having the chance to see the Bolognese master’s very rich personal library, she had no doubts in devoting herself to this new project. Returning to Bologna in May 2020, the realization of the work was complicated and interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Back in the United States, in her studio in Sag Harbour, New York, she said, “I had the photos I had taken, but I still did not have the complete project, and I was aware of that. I had had a dream opportunity, I had gone to Bologna but had come back with the incomplete project.”

When she returned to Casa Morandi in 2022, she entered the artist’s studio already having ideas about the collage in mind and used some of Morandi’s most familiar subjects in his works, such as bottles, cans, vases, cups and other objects, to enrich the compositions, emptying them of meaning. “What I realized, surrounded by all the vases he used, is how extraordinary he was,” the photographer recounted. “I viscerally sensed the extraordinary alchemy that takes place between these rather ordinary-looking objects, which become those iconic characters that he continuously paints. If one did not know his work, one would never get there. It is not obvious that those objects created those paintings.”

“Objects blend into one another, forms hide behind or within one another through the use of color and light, creating enchanted and seemingly illusory images,” curator Alessia Masi wrote in the catalog. “Mary Ellen’s intuition of blurring certain parts within the composition evokes certain modes of expression used by Morandi especially in his later years and especially in watercolor, the medium best suited to him to record the continuous mutations of the visible, like a seismograph capable of capturing and synthesizing into an absolute every slightest variation of the infinite dynamics of reality. It is precisely on refined sheets of paper that Morandi can achieve results that oil does not fully allow him, effects of transparency that create almost an expectation out of time, objects that, with their undefined contours, seem to evaporate in part toward infinity, unpainted areas that seem to want to be invaded by the universe that penetrates them. Mysterious, almost dreamlike atmosphere in which an irreconcilable balance in human experience is realized: that between dream and reality. Perfectly balanced images, prefigured in the artist’s mind and perfected through the use of modest optical instruments that foreshadow the more technological devices used by photographers today: a canvas used as a filter to modulate the light and fragments of celluloid sheets subdivided by Morandi himself into more or less dense grids and gratings to frame the composition, divide it according to the Cartesian model and distill its two-dimensional vision to be transferred to the canvas. Those same fragments that Bartley inserts in her works to better understand Morandi’s method, to ensure a structural balance to the photographic image and to create her personal compositions in which the squared forms of the books are interwoven describing original geographies that sometimes also enclose objects or part of them, always in a perfect balance between idea and form.”

The exhibition also features a video made by Bartley herself, in which she recounts her encounter with Giorgio Morandi’s work and books, the experience she had and the modus operandi used in the realization of this project.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Italian/English catalog published by Danilo Montanari Editore, with texts by Alessia Masi, Lorenza Selleri, and reproductions of all the photographic works on display.

During ART CITY Bologna days, Feb. 1 to 4, 2024, admission is free (Feb. 1,2 and 4 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Feb. 3 from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.).

Hours: Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 2 to 7 p.m.; Thursdays from 2 to 8 p.m.; Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed on non-holiday Mondays.

Image: Mary Ellen Bartley, Large White Bottle and Shadow (2022; archival pigment print mounted on dibond, 68.58 x 91.44 cm)

At the Museo Morandi, Mary Ellen Bartley's first Italian solo exhibition reinterprets the works of Giorgio Morandi

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