Exposition Giacometti / Morandi @ Institut Giacometti, Paris - "Giacometti / Morandi. Moments immobiles" + Catalogue

Giacometti / Morandi 

Moments immobiles 

Institut Giacometti, Paris 

15 novembre 2024 - 2 mars 2025 

L’exposition Giacometti / Morandi. Moments immobiles propose la rencontre inédite des œuvres de deux artistes majeurs de l’après-guerre. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) et Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), bien que contemporains, ne se sont jamais croisés, cependant de nombreux traits essentiels les rapprochent. Cette exposition est la première occasion d’interroger ces proximités : leur pratique singulière de l’atelier, l’attachement à un environnement et des modèles familiers, et une recherche originale née de l’attention portée au réel.

Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) et Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) sont des contemporains. Tous deux ont fait de leur atelier, chambre-atelier Via Fondazza à Bologne pour Morandi, atelier de la rue Hippolyte-Maindron dans le quartier du Montparnasse pour Giacometti, la matrice d’une œuvre dominée par la continuité d’une seule et même recherche dont le développement exprime le sens même de leur vie. Ils partagent la récurrence des mêmes modèles : les objets collectés par Morandi pour être peints, les figures centrales d’Annette et Diego, parmi un cercle étroit de personnalités qui va s’élargissant pour Giacometti.

Ils ont volontairement peu voyagé. La vie de Morandi se répartit entre Bologne, sa ville natale et Grizzana, village des Apennins où il va principalement l’été. Giacometti, installé à Paris depuis 1922, se rend presque chaque année à Stampa et Maloja, les maisons de son enfance dans le Val Bregaglia.

Artistes majeurs du XXe siècle, ils apparaissent comme des voix singulières qui, ayant traversé les avant-gardes, renouvellent des formes classiques : la nature morte et le paysage pour Giorgio Morandi, la figure humaine pour Alberto Giacometti, l’un et l’autre incarnant dans les années de l’après-guerre une vision de la condition humaine universelle.

Au moment où les débats entre figuration et abstraction font rage, où les artistes sont sommés de se ranger dans un camp ou l’autre, tous deux développent un art relié au réel, mais non réaliste et qui, à partir de la transcription du monde visible, vise à l’essence.

Cette exposition réunit les collections de la Fondation Giacometti à des prêts du Museo Morandi, Bologne et de collections privées européennes.

Elle propose une traversée de leurs carrières de 1913 à 1965 en quatre chapitres : L’Atelier ; Le Familier ; La traversée des avant-gardes ; Regarder le réel.

Commissaire : Françoise Cohen

En collaboration avec le Settore Musei Civici Bologna, Museo Morandi (Italie)

CATALOGUE

GIACOMETTI / MORANDI

MOMENTS IMMOBILES

Catalogue co-édité

par la Fondation Giacometti et FAGE éditions, Lyon

Bilingue français/anglais.

144 pages - Format 17 ×23,5 cm

Prix public : 26 € - ISBN 978 2 84975787 1

SOMMAIRE

Finalement, moi, je peins pour voir

Françoise Cohen

Giacometti et Morandi face à Cézanne

Laure-Caroline Semmer

Les Années de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, un exil à la maison

Alice Ensabella 

Mordre la réalité

Erik Verhagen

Art et vie dans les ateliers de Morandi et Giacometti

Alessia Masi

Institut Giacometti

5, rue Victor-Schœlcher, 75014 Paris

institut-giacometti.fr

Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi @ David Zwirner, New York - Never Finished

Albers and Morandi: Never Finished

David Zwirner, New York

Through April 3, 2021

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. —Italo Calvino

David Zwirner is pleased to present Albers and Morandi: Never Finished, curated by gallery Partner David Leiber. The exhibition explores the formal and visual affinities and contrasts between two of the twentieth century’s greatest painters: JOSEF ALBERS (1888–1976) and GIORGIO MORANDI (1890–1964).

Both Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi are best known for their decades-long elaborations of singular motifs: from 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers employed his nested square format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects, while Morandi, in his intimate still lifes and occasional landscapes, engaged viewers’ perceptual understanding and memory of everyday objects and spaces. Albers and Morandi: Never Finished puts each artist’s distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, morphology, and seriality in dialogue. Looking specifically at the stunning palettes of Morandi’s celebrated tabletop still lifes depicting humble vessels and vases and Albers’s seminal Homage to the Square series, the exhibition elucidates how the two artists’ careful daily acts of duration and devotion allowed each to highlight the essence of color and the endless possibilities of their respective visual motifs. This shared aesthetic intensity links both artists and underscores their deep commitment to their forms. As Morandi once said, “One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.”1

Though both Albers and Morandi created formally unique approaches to painting, their individual explorations of color reveal visual connections that resound throughout the exhibition. Both artists had a  novel understanding of how the quantity and interaction of color within a structured serial format could result in distinctive, visually vibrant compositions. As Heinz Liesbrock, director of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, notes, “Anyone who makes contact with Morandi’s and Albers’s pictures quickly discovers the central importance of color in the constitution of their pictorial cosmos. For Morandi, color defines forms and space—that is, it differentiates both planes and at the same time brings them closer together.… Albers’s color fields, on the other hand, although they are linearly defined and thus seem clearly separated from each other in the individual picture, merge into each other in the process of seeing, forming new connections and thereby blurring the levels of surface and space.”2

Here, color comes to be a shared, transcendent language through which the artworks communicate with each other. A small midnight-blue vessel isolated against an offwhite grayish ground in Morandi’s Natura morta (Still Life) (1959) seems to reiterate the status of the outermost square of cerulean blue in an Albers Homage from 1961. A rich vermillion, enclosed within a square of Naples yellow, in a 1954 , echoes the sienna red of a vessel in a rare, early Fiori (Flowers) (1915) by Morandi. The status of form, how Albers’s squares can project and recede based on their relation to one another, recalls how the experience of Morandi’s vases and pitchers are contingent upon the color, shape, and size of all the other items depicted in the composition. The pairings in the show bring out surprising and unexpected qualities in each artist’s work. Through their dialogue with Morandi’s still lifes, Albers’s linear, structured compositions reveal a painterly sensuousness and tactility that was always latent within them. The underlying conviction and determinacy of Morandi’s painterly act is never more evident than when his flowers and vessels rest adjacent to an Homage. The refinement of Morandi’s practice is further explored in the exhibition through the inclusion of a selection of the artist’s prints.

Building on the connections established between the two artists in dual shows in 2005, Josef Albers, the first major exhibition of Albers’s work in Italy at the Museo Morandi, Bologna, and Giorgio Morandi: Landschaft (Giorgio Morandi: Landscape) at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany, Albers and Morandi: Never Finished offers the rare opportunity to make such individualized connections between these two artists, reaffirming the importance of each to the history of modern art, and underscoring their continued relevance to artists today. A catalogue of the exhibition was published by David Zwirner Books.

JOSEF ALBERS was born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888 and studied briefly at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, in 1919 before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. In 1922, Albers joined the school’s faculty, first working in stained glass and, starting in 1923, teaching design. In 1933, he and Anni Albers emigrated to North Carolina, where they founded the art department at Black Mountain College. The Alberses remained at Black Mountain until 1949 and in 1950 moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers was invited to direct a newly formed department of design at Yale University School of Art. In 1950, too, he developed what would become his seminal series, which he continued to elaborate until his death in 1976. Recent exhibitions of his work include at the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, in 2014 (traveled to Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway). In 2017, Josef Albers in Mexico was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2018. Anni and Josef Albers: Art and Life will be on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2021. The Josef Albers Museum opened in 1983 in Bottrop, Germany.

Since May 2016, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has been exclusively represented by David Zwirner. The artist’s work has been the subject of three previous solo exhibitions at the gallery: Sonic Albers, which was on view in New York in 2019; Sunny Side Up, shown in London in 2017; and Grey Steps, Grey Scales, Grey Ladders, presented in New York in 2016.

GIORGIO MORANDI was born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, where he lived until his death in 1964. From 1907 to 1913, he was enrolled at the Bologna Accademia di Belle Arti, where he later served as the professor of engraving and etching from 1930 until 1956. By 1920, Morandi established the small-scale depictions of still lifes and landscapes that he would pursue throughout his oeuvre, and that were associated with no other school or style but his own. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives and traveling solo exhibitions at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (1981–1982); Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, which traveled to IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia (1999); Tate Modern, London, which traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2001–2002); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which traveled to the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (2008–2009); Museo d’Arte della Città di Lugano, Switzerland (2012); and the BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2013).

A Backward Glance: Giorgio Morandi and the Old Masters, a major exhibition examining the formation of Morandi’s practice, was presented in 2019 at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. In 2020, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, Giorgio Morandi: Major Works from the Cerruti Collection, was featured at the Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. The Museo Morandi was established in 1993 in Bologna, Italy, and is currently located in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. In 2015, David Zwirner presented Giorgio Morandi, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the artist’s work.

1. Morandi quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “Looking Long and Hard at Morandi,” The New York Times (October 14, 2004) [accessed online].

2. Heinz Liesbrock, Giorgio Morandi: Landschaft. Exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2005), p. 14.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

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Giorgio Morandi - David Zwirner Gallery, NYC

Giorgio Morandi

David Zwirner, New York

November 6 — December 19, 2015

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings from the 1940s to the 1960s by the celebrated Italian artist GIORGIO MORANDI (1890 - 1964). The first major exhibition of Giorgo Morandi's later work in America since the acclaimed 2008 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the show focuses primarily on the period during which he developed and refined his investigations of serial, reductive, and permutational forms and compositions–aspects that had a profound influence on twentieth-century and contemporary art and painting. The exhibition includes important loans from institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., as well as from numerous significant private collections.

Over the course of his five-decade career, Giorgio Morandi was most prolific during the postwar years from 1948 until his death in 1964, when he executed more than half of his entire output of paintings. Throughout these intensely creative years, Giorgio Morandi worked almost exclusively in series. Remaining dedicated to the repertoire of subjects that had occupied him since the early 1910s, including tabletop still lifes of bottles, boxes, vases, and flowers, as well as occasional landscapes, his variations on a given compositional motif became more persistent, nuanced, and abstract in the later part of his life. Through subtle shifts in color, tone, scale, composition, and mark-making, Morandi was able to convey the ever-changing perceptual understanding and memory of the objects and spaces one encounters.

Although Giorgio Morandi rarely traveled outside of Italy and never beyond Europe, his work was exhibited internationally and was included in a number of landmark presentations in the United States beginning in the late 1940s, such as Twentieth-Century Italian Art, organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and James Thrall Soby at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1949; the important exhibition Painting in Post-War Italy, 1945-1957, at the Casa Italiana at Columbia University, New York; and The New Renaissance in Italy at the Pasadena Art Museum, California–both in 1958, which captivated an American audience. While the subsequent impact of Morandi's work on artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Wayne Theibaud, and Luc Tuymans is well recognized, his legacy also extends to the realm of sculpture and installation art. The simplicity of his compositions, the logic of differentiated repetition, the placement of objects in series, and the increasing emphasis on geometry and spatial concerns were prescient to the development of Minimalism and the works of Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, as well as to the sequential works of Conceptual artists On Kawara and Roman Opalka. Moreover, artists associated with the Light and Space movement, such as Robert Irwin, responded to the phenomenological aspects of Giorgio Morandi's works, particularly the spatial and temporal ambiguities produced through the play of color and light, the blurring of object and background, and the uncertain state of material presence and absence. Much like these artists, Giorgio Morandi in a 1957 letter remarked, "The only interest the visible world awakens in me concerns space, light, color, and form."¹

Giorgio Morandi's serial and permutational investigations are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in his still life compositions. Included in this exhibition are four of the artist's iconic yellow cloth paintings: executed in 1952, the paintings from this series each depict a group of three to five bottles arranged on a tabletop and clustered around a crumpled yellow cloth. By varying the hue of the central bowl as well as the shapes and configurations of the vessels and cloth, Giorgio Morandi articulated faint but profound distinctions and affinities of color, shape, and volume. Also included in the exhibition is a pivotal 1956 canvas from a series in which Morandi foregrounded rectangular blocks of rich yellow, salmon, and cream colors, whose geometric forms relate most closely to those of Minimalist sculpture. Several paintings depicting Giorgio Morandi’s favored subjects–a yellow Persian bottle, a white fluted vase, and a water jug–will also feature in the exhibition. The artist's serial depiction of these objects, shown variously arranged in irregular configurations and tightly compacted so as to layer, abut, and obfuscate the shapes of adjacent forms, elaborate Giorgio Morandi’s credo that "Nothing is more abstract than reality."²

GIORGIO MORANDI was born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, where he lived until his death in 1964. From 1907-13, he was enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti Bologna, where he later served as the professor of engraving and etching from 1930-56. In 1913-14, he established connections and exhibited with Italian Futurist artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Fortunato Depero, and in 1918-19, he worked briefly as part of the Scuola Metafisica with Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. By 1920, Morandi established the small scale depictions of still lifes and landscapes that he would pursue for the remainder of his career, and that were associated with no

other school or style but his own.

The artist’s works can be found in important public and private collections internationally including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Trento, Italy; the Museo del Novecento, Milan; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Giorgio Morandi was a member of the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence; the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome; and the Swedish Academy. In 1993, the Museo Morandi was established in Bologna, Italy, and is currently located in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.

David Leiber, Director at David Zwirner, organized the exhibition Giorgio Morandi at the gallery.

¹Giorgio Morandi, letter dated January 6, 1957, quoted in Ernst-Gerhard Güse and Franz Armin Morat, eds., Giorgio Morandi: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Etchings (Munich: Prestel, 2008), p. 15.

²Giorgio Morandi, interview by Professor Peppino Mangravite, aired on The Voice of America, Presto Recording Corporation, Paramus, New Jersey, April 25, 1957, quoted in Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed., The Later Morandi: Still Lifes 1950-1964. Exh. cat. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1998), p.13.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Giorgio Morandi - Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal - Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art

Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal 

12 January – 25 March 2006

This exhibition explores Giorgio Morandi’s influence on British artists, past and present, by juxtaposing drawings, paintings and etchings by Morandi alongside works by 20th century and contemporary British artists, including David Hockney, Tony Cragg, Rachel Whiteread, Michael Craig-Martin, Patrick Caulfield, Paul Winstanley, Paul Coldwell, Christopher Le Brun, Victor Willing, Ben Nicholson, William Scott and Euan Uglow. Many of these artists have pointed to Giorgio Morandi as being an influence, but for some the relationship with their work is tangential. The aim of the exhibition is not to illustrate direct influences or particular references to Giorgio Morandi in the selected works, but rather to set up ‘conversations’ between his work and that of contemporary British artists, addressing themes that have become central within contemporary art practice, including negative space, the recording of the passing of time, and art as process.

The exhibition includes important drawings, paintings and etchings by Giorgio Morandi on loan from public and private collections in Britain and Europe, including several works from Italian collections including Museo Morandi in Bologna and the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. Other major loans include works from the British Museum, the Arts Council Collection, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

GIORGIO MORANDI (1890-1964) is one of the most admired Italian painters of the twentieth century, known for his contemplative still life paintings of familiar objects: vases, bottles and boxes, painted in subtle combinations of colour using a narrow range of tones. Morandi never visited Britain during his lifetime, and yet the popularity of his work has grown steadily here since the 1950s. His intimate still life paintings were first seen in this country in the 1950 Arts Council exhibition of Modern Italian Art at the Tate, and since then he has been the subject of many solo and themed shows in major British galleries.

The exhibition has been curated by the artist Professor Paul Coldwell, Postgraduate Programme Director at Camberwell College of Arts, and organised by the Estorick Collection in collaboration with Abbot Hall Art Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, published by Philip Wilson, which includes an essay by Paul Coldwell and interviews with some of the aforementioned artists, discussing their interpretations of Morandi’s work. The exhibition will travel to The Estorick Collection between 5 April and 18 June 2006.

HABBOT HALL ART GALLERY

Kendal, Cumbria LA9 5AL

www.abothhall.org.uk