Giorgio Morandi — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 9 → October 7, 2017

The Galerie Karsten Greve announces its forthcoming exhibition of art by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), twenty years after the groundbreaking 1996 exhibition in Cologne which led major international collections to acquire his work. Given the scarcity of Morandi’s output, the exceptional array of some fifty works, including 38 still lifes and 15 landscapes, makes the exhibition a very special event indeed. The paintings, drawings, watercolours, and engravings from the period 1927 to 1963, on loan from major private collections, reflect the outstanding complexity of Morandi’s oeuvre and shed significant light on his artistic career. The exhibition is museum-quality in the scope and quality of works on display and aims to build on the most prestigious retrospectives of Giorgio Morandi’s work worldwide.

Giorgio Morandi’s work is deeply rooted in the experience of everyday life and draws on the connection between the object and its representation in the artist’s mind. He was a solitary figure, working alone in his Bologna studio for most of his life, his art entirely focused on depicting his immediate surroundings. His inspiration came from the bottles of oil, vases, and cartons around him in the studio and the view from its windows. Once layered with matte paint, the objects became disembodied entities, “things” rather than objects, pretexts for painting rather than models in their own right.

Far from seeking merely to depict reality, Morandi’s main interest lay in the ontological status of painting in terms of shape, colour, and space. His quest for painting structured solely by these elements led him to turn to avant-garde aesthetic experiments. He was initially briefly attracted to the Futurists but then moved on to metaphysical painting in the late 1910s, drawn by its attempts to embody space in concrete terms by giving precise shapes geometric form. When sketched in simple outline, still lifes became a laboratory for aesthetic experimentation that foregrounded the conceptualisation, rather than the depiction, of a given object.

Giorgio Morandi’s oeuvre offers a subtly varied, multi-directional ensemble centering on one almost unchanging motif, imbued with a far-reaching meditation on the essence of painting.