Lugano
Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna in 1890. He attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna from 1907 to 1913. During these years, he studied the work of Paul Cézanne, which will have a significant impact on his artistic production. He had the opportunity of meeting Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà in an event of the Futurists in the Teatro del Corso in Bologna in 1914. In the same year, he participated in the “First Free Futurist Exhibition” in Galleria Sprovieri in Rome. The artist also closely examined the Cubist style of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as well as the painting of Henri Rousseau. Around 1918-19, he turned to the “Pittura Metafisica” and took on motifs of Giorgio de Chirico in his paintings. He joined the group “Valori Plastici” in 1922. From the 1920s, Morandi restricted his choice of subjects almost exclusively to still lifes, with the exception of a few landscapes. His palette was composed by gentle and delicate tones, such as an earthen yellow, ochre, gray blue and rose. His contemplative still lifes usually show just a few plain bottles, cups, bowls and jars, which he always arranged anew. The simple object’s plasticity is achieved by the right arrangement of light and dark areas. The objects are more and more reduced to their simple geometric shape as of the late 1930s, when his attention turned to the painting surface. From 1914 to 1930, Morandi worked as a drawing teacher in Bologna, and he taught graphic art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in his hometown until 1956. In 1955, he showed eleven of his works in his own booth at the first documenta in Kassel. One year later, after he had already retired, the artist went onto his first journey abroad on occasion of a joint exhibition with Giacomo Manzù in Winterthur, which is also where he visited the collection Oskar Reinhart, the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. He was awarded the Grand Prize for Etchings at the fourth Biennale in Sao Paulo in 1957. Despite his artistic success, Morandi led a rather secluded life in his hometown, spending the summers in the small mountain village of Grizzana. He died in Bologna in 1964.
