The exhibition Giorgio Morandi – Il tempo sospeso (Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended), curated by Marilena Pasquali, the founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center in Bologna, was developed in partnership with the Morandi Study Center, under the auspices of the Municipality of Rome and the Municipality of Grizzana Morandi. Its aim is to showcase the artistic journey of the master painter over four decades, focusing particularly on the period from the 1920s to the early 1960s.
Around forty paintings and works on paper serve as a retrospective of Morandi’s artistic journey, seeking to explore the understanding of his “difficult and secret” art, paraphrasing Cesare Brandi. The close juxtaposition of some of Morandi’s variants and the exhibitions of some unpublished documents unearthed from the artist’s family archives highlights new critical ideas.
Giorgio Morandi – Il tempo sospeso endeavors to present Morandi as a figure deeply rooted in the twentieth century, both as a man and an artist, living through two world wars and feeling the weight of disillusionment, the loss of references, the defeat of every belief. To stem the drift of human, the painter strove to establish a mental equilibrium, a harmony of forms, where materiality metamorphoses into luminosity. Yet, this quest for order does not obliterate the undercurrent of uncertainty that permeates each of his compositions, transmuting into a sense of anticipation and suspension.
Marilena Pasquali defines the strength of Morandi’s art with these words: “Putting reality between brackets in order to be able to experience it. To distance oneself from the world in order to be able to inhabit it, to accept it without losing autonomy of thought and humanity of behavior. Support the importance of suspension, the need for waiting, the need for detachment.” She continues: “Rarely has an artist been able to convey all this – reason and feeling fused together – as Giorgio Morandi did with his compositions of objects, his glimpses of nature, his silk flowers, images apparently so “neutral” and in reality, so strong, so empty of men and so full of humanity.”