Dennis Hollingsworth

Morandi Panel at Zwirner

Last fall, there was a significant exhibition of Giorgio Morandi's paintings at Mattia de Luca Gallery in the Upper East Side titled Giorgio Morandi - Time Suspended, part II.

Curated by Marilena Pasquali - founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center, Bologna - and Mattia De Luca, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 works from across Morandi's career on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the artist's death.

During the first two months of 2025, David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea opened Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation. Similar to the Mattia de Luca show, the Zwirner presentation is closely coordinated with formidable institutions supporting Morandi's legacy across the Atlantic.

The Zwirner show seemed -to my eye- to feature off brand Morandi, what people usually identify as the typical Silence and Light Morandi (an intentional wink to Louis Kahn, same vibes). Anomalies such as (self) portraits, floral still lifestyles, atypical props, etchings, drawings, landscapes, and townscapes. It was effective if it was meant to be instrumental in destabilizing the usual image of the eternal, iconic Morandi scrubbed of detail in softened light, brush touched ever so softly and deftly. That Morandi.

There was a panel discussion. I took notes.

Some key take aways from the panel discussion:

The huge and focused support by collector Luigi Magnani. The intense and singular passion of such a supporter of means is remarkable, the dream of any artist.

The selection and arrangement or staging of his props calls theater to mind.

The influence of Morandi on generations of artists, and especially surprising, to the Conceptualists via the urge to turn the dial of materiality down to lower and lower levels towards the click signaling off.

Notable: all Morandi paintings are of different dimensions.

The arrangements of his still lifes were likened to cities, human figures, landscapes... and his landscapes could be seen as still lifes.

Thug life: Morandi spent a week in jail for suspected partisanship during the war.

His success didn't thwart, inflate or distort his "rituals", his vision.

That we might need him, living as we are in today's world, so spinning out of control.

He was a tall guy, "incredibly tall."

He said that if he was born twenty years later, he would have become an abstract artist.

Images that escape words.

Posted by Dennis at January 25, 2025 8:43 PM