GIORGIO MORANDI AT PAUL THIEBAUD GALLERY, NYC

Thursday, 21 September 2006 15:57

New York City - The Paul Thiebaud Gallery is honored to present a selection of works by Giorgio Morandi, one of the most revered modern painters of the twentieth century.  Active from the early 1900s until his death in 1964, Morandi primarily created still life compositions throughout his prolific career, earning him the label of “painter of the everyday.”   This exhibition includes selected examples of Morandi’s paintings and drawings of various genres.  The show runs through October 28, 2006.

Born in 1890, Morandi entered school at the age of seventeen, graduating six years later.  The artist began with still life almost immediately.  His early work produced during World War I bears the influence of the Futurist and Metaphysical movements.  During this period, the artist began reducing the objects depicted in his work to stark, basic forms, starting the course of a life-long investigation in the formal concerns of painting.  After 1945 and the end of World War II, Morandi’s style had reached its full maturity resulting in paintings of reductive yet elegant arrangements of pure forms.

Morandi’s unwavering commitment to a particular subject matter, often repeatedly depicting even the same stark objects, caused derision from his critics who interpreted his art as old-fashioned, vernacular “genre painting” unconcerned with content and modern ideals.  However, though his art may seem reductive and simplistic initially, it is precisely those narrow boundaries established through his focus on one theme that allowed for a thorough exploration of formal concerns and relationships of form, space, and light. His works are eloquent statements about perception and the process of seeing.