The contemporaneity of Giorgio Morandi. An exhibition at the Maurizio Nobile gallery in Milan

Morandi and contemporaneity: this is the title of the exhibition that, in Milan, the Maurizio Nobile Fine Art gallery is organizing at its headquarters in Palazzo Bagatti Valsecchi, Via Santo Spirito 7, from October 13 to December 2023. The exhibition intends to explore the link between Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 - 1964) and the contemporary, addressed several times over time, which testifies to the continuous and never dormant relevance of the poetics of the great Bolognese master.

A poetics based on silence and the restless mystery behind apparent reality. After all, “nothing is more abstract than the real,” says Morandi in one of his famous phrases interpreted in different ways, testifying to his intimate bond with the everydayness of existence, with the intimate relationship with the things that surround him: a continuous bond sustained by the link between the object, the protagonist of the pictorial representation, and the subject who observes it. With Morandi, the revelation consists in the fact that the novelty, the variability is inserted in the context of an almost monochrome reality, in a gradation of nuances, which are exerted on a subject reduced to its minimum terms, in a scene in which there is no apparent narrative, in that motionless time, which has led us to designate as still lifes so many works where the absence of organic nature is redeemed precisely by the life that leavens otherwise insensible objects.

Morandi, underneath the apparent repetitiveness of a figurative discourse that is always the same, addressed throughout his life, the problem of the redemption of matter. Related to the poetics of the Bolognese master in the exhibition are the works of two contemporary artists: painter Andrea Federici and glass sculptor Joan Crous. Personalities different from each other but - in their own way - in tune with Morandi’s. Andrea Federici retrieves from these themes and subjects, which he channels into an artistic ’craft’ devoted to meticulous attention to describing reality. Joan Crous shares choices with Morandi on several levels: a life in the Bolognese Apennines and an artistic interest in the forms and colors of the everyday. If Morandi’s canvases propose a solid, highly simplified geometry, Joan’s volumes take them up with the passage of time, immortalizing them but at the same time reproducing their fragility. In her ’Homages to Morandi’ and in her ’Cenae’ the present (what is most everyday and usual in our lives) becomes event. A goal made possible thanks to the artistic fact that, by a process of fossilization, transforms the happening into the past. Therefore, the work becomes an image of a past happening that wants to invite remembrance, through fragile traces consumed by time.

The exhibition is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Opening Oct. 12 from 6 to 9 p.m. (Federici and Crous will be present). Free admission. For information: www.maurizionobile.com

The contemporaneity of Giorgio Morandi. An exhibition at the Maurizio Nobile gallery in Milan

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