Review
"Morandi painted a zone of reality that is within reach yet cannot be touched, infusing vision with a delicate frustration of tactility. The result is an ontological mystery, confounding sight with touch and both with wonderment at their mutuality." -- Peter Schjeldahl ― The New Yorker
“In his still lifes, the sublime” -- Karen Wilkin ― Wall Street Journal
“Rigorous explorations of geometry and light” -- Dorothy Spears ― The New York Times
“Morandi’s work becomes an exercise in care, restraint, and skill… The exhibition at David Zwirner shows Morandi at his most mature." -- Sarah E. Fensom ― Art & Antiques
“It is easy to remember having been moved, profoundly, by a Morandi still-life, but never quite how. You have to see one again to reenter the mystery...Beauty is [Morandi’s] recurrent consolation and our regular bliss.” -- Staff ― The New Yorker
“The recent apotheosis of Giorgio Morandi is a little more surprising… To this growing corpus, we can now add the perspectives of other contemporary artists collected in David Zwirner Books’s Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings.” -- David Carrier ― The Brooklyn Rail
“Like the softly repeated murmur of a prayer, there’s something both comforting and conservative in Giorgio Morandi’s career-long affinity for painting small still lifes of bottles, vases and other objects arranged in his studio. The Italian modernist has long been considered an ‘artist’s artist,” and his unassuming canvases have developed something of a cult following.” -- Julian Kreimer ― Art in America
About the Author
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.
Laura Mattioli is the daughter of the important Italian collector Gianni Mattioli, who in 1949 acquired Pietro Feroldi’s collection that highlighted the relationship between Italian modernists and French Post-Impressionists, and which included works by Giorgio Morandi from the 1910s to the 1940s. With her father, Laura visited Morandi during her childhood and has lived with his paintings practically all her life. She holds a PhD in the history of art, and since 1984 she has managed her father’s collection, for which she has acquired additional works by Morandi. Mattioli has curated several exhibitions on the artist, including Last Morandi (1997–1998), in Verona and Venice; Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings, 1950–1964 (2004), Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York; and Giorgio Morandi et l’abstraction du réel (2010), Hotel des Arts, Toulon, France. In 2013, she founded the Center for Italian Modern Art, in New York, where she has presented two exhibitions on Morandi, in 2015–2016 and 2018–2019.
