LITTERA TOUR

GIORGIO MORANDI

The soul is on the bottle



Living and working in a Bologna apartment that he shared with his three unmarried sisters, Morandi painted on models he kept all around the house: hundreds of bottles, boxes, jars, and vases… In these surroundings Morandi’s acted as a Zen master, using common objects that gave his paintings a poetic aura: “there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality,” the painter once said…




…The objects in his paintings dissolve and reconstitute themselves before your eyes. Edges go wobbly, space pulsates. His art makes you sense Goethe's “mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain”. He painted things one sees all the time, yet portrayed things never seen before…



…Casual viewers might dismiss the narrow scope and subdued quality of Morandi's work as tedious, but a broad, fervent following has embraced those limits as virtues. The repetition offers insight into process and serves as a vehicle for a meditative, introspective practice...



…During the II World War the painter lived reclusive in Bologna. But he never stopped, even during the bad times, to sell his paintings. The curious thing is that he used to sell his paintings for a dollar a piece…



…Then someone told him that his works was selling very well in New York and that he´d been abused for the cheap price he sold them. So Morandi raised the price of his painting for two dollars a piece… What about that?


Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964)