the exhibition ‘Morandi 1890-1964’ opens tomorrow at Palazzo Reale – Libero Quotidiano

2023-10-04 19:43:00

Milan, 4 Oct. (time.news) – From 5 October to 4 February 2024 on the main floor of Palazzo Reale the exhibition ‘Morandi 1890 – 1964’ opens to the public, conceived and curated by Maria Cristina Bandera, promoted by the Municipality of Milan, produced by Palazzo Reale, Civita Mostre and Museums and 24 Ore Culture – 24 Ore Group, in collaboration with the Bologna Civic Museums sector | Morandi Museum, and created thanks to the Unipol Group, main sponsor and Bper Banca, exhibition sponsor.

More than thirty years after the last exhibition, Milan dedicates a major exhibition to Giorgio Morandi to celebrate the elective relationship between the city and the Bolognese painter. In fact, the first great collectors of Morandi lived in Milan or were from Lombardy – such as Vitali, Feroldi, Scheiwiller, Valdameri, De Angeli, Jesi, Jucker, Boschi Di Stefano, Vismara – and the Galleria del Milione was Milanese, with which the painter entertained a privileged relationship. ‘Morandi 1890-1964’, conceived and curated by Maria Cristina Bandera, is among the most important and complete retrospectives on the Bolognese painter carried out in recent decades due to the extent and quality of the works, in continuity with the consolidated appreciation of his work in prestigious international venues , from the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2008), to the Pushkin in Moscow (2017), to the Guggenheim in Bilbao (2019).

An exhibition corpus of around 120 works traces the entire oeuvre of the Bolognese artist, fifty years of activity, from 1913 to 1963, through exceptional loans from important public institutions and prestigious private collections, starting with those of the Morandi Museum | Bologna Civic Museums and Milanese collections sector – Pinacoteca di Brera, Museo Novecento, Gallery of Modern Art, Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano, Villa Necchi Campiglio-Fai Fondo Ambiente Italiano -, to which are added the Mart of Rovereto, the Gam of Turin, Palazzo Pitti, the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Florence, the National Art Gallery of Siena, the Gallery of Modern Art of Roma Capitale, the Roberto Longhi Foundation of Florence, the Magnani-Rocca Foundation of Mamiano di Traversetolo, the Domus Foundation of Verona , the Giorgio Cini Foundation and the Carraro Foundation of Venice. Among the international loans, the Vatican Museums, the Musée Jenisch of Vevey and the public collections of Winterthur and Siegen, cities where Morandi exhibited while still alive in 1957 and 1962, receiving the prestigious Rubenspreis from the German city. Among the loans from public bodies, the Chamber of Deputies, Eni, Telecom and Rai.

The exhibition itinerary follows a chronological criterion with combinations that document the stylistic evolution and modus operandi of the painter, in the variation of the chosen themes – still life, landscape, flowers and only rarely figures – and of the techniques: painting, etching and watercolour. Halfway through the route, a video installation, created in collaboration with the Morandi Museum of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector, presents the visitor with the room-study in Via Fondazza in Bologna, now a museum, where Morandi lived and worked until his last days.

The exhibition, whose itinerary is divided into 34 sections, opens with 1913 and the avant-garde masterpieces, a personal assimilation of the new cubist spatiality, and ends in 1963, with a rarefied painting taken to the extreme of formal verisimilitude, synthesis of a fifty-year excavation into reality according to the famous Morandi postulate: “I believe that there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality”.

The entire Morandi experience moves between these two poles: an early comparison with international artistic innovations and the formulation of a language capable of translating the anxieties of modernity. It was his belief, he declared in 1955, that “the images and feelings aroused by the visible world, which is a formal world”, are “inexpressible in words”. The task of art is to “drop those diaphragms, those conventional images” that stand between the artist and reality. His symbolic universe made up of the most common objects, immunized from reality and suspended from their function, already prepared by a sort of ‘first painting’ with the dust deposited by time or the addition of pictorial glazes, is a pretext for ‘making that diaphragm drops, to reveal what is abstract about reality.