"Morandi. Infinite resonance" at the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera

Organized by the MAPFRE Foundation and the La Pedrera Catalonia Foundation, Morandi. Infinite Resonance takes a retrospective tour of the work of Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890-1964), one of the most significant and unclassifiable artists in the history of twentieth-century art. Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera is hosting this exhibition from February 4 to May 22, 2022.

The Morandi exhibition. Infinite Resonance, curated by Beatrice Avanzi and Daniela Ferrari, curators of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto (MART), brings together a careful and significant selection of paintings, drawings and engravings from various museums and private collections of Europe. Unclassifiable painter, but a key figure in the artistic scene of the first half of the twentieth century, the Italian painter and engraver Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) can be considered a timeless artist, whose work stands out for its high quality and high degree of refinement, with a totally personal language. Although he cannot be framed in any of the great movements of contemporary art, his work tries to capture reality as faithfully as possible through light, color and volumetric values, in a constant search for the essence of painting.

The Italian painter barely traveled outside of Italy and spent most of his life in the Via Fondazza home-workshop in Bologna. There he tackled a work in which everyday objects, flowers and the landscape became protagonists, with the intention of creating, as Ardengo Soffici pointed out, "a harmonious set of colors, shapes and volumes that obey exclusively the laws of unity, such as the beauty of agreements. "

Morandi always worked on figurative painting, mainly still lifes and sporadically some landscapes, which gradually became more symbolic. Morandi himself went so far as to state that "the feelings and images that the visible world arouses in us are very difficult to express or perhaps inexpressible with words, because they are determined by shapes, colors, space and light." His style, in which he emphasizes above all the masterful use of light, is based on the search for a formal simplification in which the subjects are reduced to the essential. For Morandi the use of repetition was key, and the same set of objects was revisited by the artist again and again in paintings and etchings.

Photo credit: Giorgio Morandi. Still life, 1953-1954.