Twentyone still lifes by Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 – 1964), some of which are from private collections and are on public display for the very first time. “Silent and humble” paintings in which the colours “vibrate with a slightly subdued brilliance that seems to come from within … a style of painting that belongs perfectly in the perceptive and mental space between the visible and invisible” (Francesco Poli, from the exhibition catalogue).
An outstanding and unique opportunity to create a whole made of assonance and evocations: On the one hand, with formal research, with Fortuny’s finest details, on the other, with the “metaphysical spaces” of Tirelli, on display on the first and second floor.

Curated by Daniela Ferretti and Franco Calarota.

Catalogue Skira
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Offering a detailed selection of rarely exposed works covering a period of time that goes from 1921 to 1963 the aim of the exhibition is to immerge the visitor inside the same meditative silence that Giorgio Morandi creates during realisation of his paintings.
The visitor is invited to penetrate in the painting in order to find a personal interpreation, that may also be simply questioning himself on the meaning of those vases and bottles, and of those objects that are always similar but always different, that are the code, the expressive alphabet of the artist. The attempt is to encourage a dialogue, between the artwork and the spectator, that is deprived of filters and words, being conscious that Morandi’s silence does not lend itself to an unambiguous interpretation and may each time be read and instantly known in a different way: not one but more silences, which are all possible fil rouge of his work.
It is around this very topic that Morandi’s critics have always expressed themselves. Arnaldo Beccaria (1939) narrates the ascetic preparation of each work “made of hungers, silences, and mortifications of colour” where “art is the expression of the moral dress of the artist” and of those “notes of colour that always compose themselves in the artwork’s silence; and that silence is lightened by an intense and secret music” that envelopes the work in “an absolute order” where everything is equalled, following an a inborn calculation, which is very acute and infallible, a sublime equation” where colours burn “as an intense and unconsummated sacrificed to silence”.
Following Francesco Arcangeli the masters “appears to render, maybe unconsciously, through his silence the supreme homage to a humanist that is desperate to see an image of man that is for now unreturnable”. Roberto Longhi suggests looking for silence in the harmony and balance of those objects which in their appearance hide a more profound reality. But it is Castor Seibel that highlights how Morandi’s painting expresses “what words can’t ever tell, that is a pictorial poem that exteriorises the elusive”. And he underlines that silence is evident to one’s eyes in the master’s works when he claims that “Morandi is capable of metamorphose silence, absence of sound, in a visual phenomenon: the light of silence”.