Still Life
Giorgio Morandi
GIORGIO MORANDI, c.1955. OIL ON CANVAS.
Giorgio Morandi’s work is humble. It does not overtly place him in a lineage of art history, nor does it try to elevate or reach towards the eternal. It is unpretentious, his subjects are limited and his lines are technically imperfect. The works are quiet, receding, and do not shout. Yet, in any gallery, their singular character is unmistakable and unignorable. Morandi was a painter of household objects in muted colours, his restraint and deliberation almost monastic, yet he established himself as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. This is partly because, Morandi was not really concerned with the objects but with the light, and the way it interacted with them and the colours it produced. It is this obsessive documentation of light, in the minutiae of it’s variations that made Morandi such a key figure for the color-field artists such as Rothko and minimalists like Donald Judd. Morandi elevated the mundane and ordinary to the exquisite and worthwhile.