Giorgio Morandi / Bernd & Hilla Becher / Trisha Donnelly

Giorgio Morandi / Bernd & Hilla Becher / Trisha Donnelly

MAMbo—Museum of Modern Art of Bologna

Lime Kiln, Harlingen, NL 1963
© 2008 Bernd & Hilla Becher / courtesy Schirmer/Mosel, Munich

March 15, 2009

Giorgio Morandi 1890 – 1964
January 22 – April 13, 2009

Bernd & Hilla Becher at
Museo Morandi

January 24 – May 3, 2009

Trisha Donnelly
February 21 – April 13, 2009

www.mambo-bologna.org

Giorgio Morandi 1890 – 1964
January 22 – April 13, 2009
curated by Maria Cristina Bandera and Renato Miracco
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna

Bernd & Hilla Becher at Museo Morandi
January 24 – May 3, 2009
curated by Gianfranco Maraniello
Museo Morandi

Trisha Donnelly
February 21 – April 13, 2009
curated by Andrea Viliani
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna

MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Minzoni 14
40121 Bologna
Italia

www.mambo-bologna.org

Museo Morandi
Piazza Maggiore 6
40121 Bologna
Italia

www.mambo-bologna.org

Giorgio Morandi 1890 – 1964

Giorgio Morandi’s artistic practice lies in the balance between an outlook typical of the Age of Enlightenment and the formal synthesis of Cézanne and Modernism. Often remembered as a reserved and reclusive man, Morandi was actually a sensitive interpreter of his time. Thanks to a constant attention for several artistic and cultural movements, he succeeded in translating the inspirations they embodied into the variants of an unfailingly autonomous approach to painting. The survey exhibition Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964, co-organised by MAMbo along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, provides one of the most complete overviews ever arranged devoted to the artist. Over one hundred paintings, watercolours, drawings, and etchings illustrate the artist’s entire creative and poetic course from the landscapes and still lives of 1913-1914 to his Metaphysical season up to the fading of the watercolours of the last years, passing through all the techniques he experimented. Particular attention is focused on the masterpieces of the 1920s and 1930s, in which Morandi perfected his extraordinary approach to image making and his in-depth investigation of the world and of human existence as filtered through the metaphor of the still life. The exhibition is documented in a wide Italian-English catalogue published by Skira, Milan, with essays by the exhibition curators Maria Cristina Bandera and Renato Miracco and by the critics Janet Abramowicz, Piero Bargellini, Flavio Fergonzi, Maria Mimita Lamberti, Edouard Roditi, Neville Rowley, Lorenza Selleri.

Bernd & Hilla Becher at Museo Morandi

In conjunction with the Morandi survey show, the Museo Morandi is pleased to present a major exhibition devoted to German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, revolutionary interpreters of conceptual photography and masters for the new generation of photographers emerged in Germany since the 1980s. The museum’s central rooms host several b/w photographic pieces grouped under the different “Typologies” that are at the centre of the artists’ interest as, among the others, blast furnaces, lime kilns, extraction towers, tanks, cooling towers, and gasometers. Bechers’ images are striking in their extreme rigour. The shots are strictly front on, with the architectural structure placed centrally, as if suspended in time. The persistent use of black and white images over the years gives a sense of continuity to the artistic project. The industrial structures are completely devoid of environmental detail or human presence, photographed from an objective perspective exalting their monumentality as well as their aesthetic and functional autonomy and encouraging the observer to enquire into the abstract nature of forms. On display at the very heart of the Museo Morandi, usually presenting the works by the Bolognese master, the exhibition establishes an unprecedented comparison between Morandi’s own practice and the one of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The exhibition catalogue, published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, contains an extended interview between Hilla Becher and the exhibition curator, Gianfranco Maraniello.

Trisha Donnelly

The work of the American artist Trisha Donnelly (San Francisco, 1974), investigating the way according to which our thoughts and convictions are formed, explores our experiences, which generally contrast with what we understand as real and with what we think of as imaginary and incessantly crosses the subtle link between sensorial and hypothetical. By focusing on the multiple boundaries and levels of the work and by evoking within the limited and artificial dimension of the institutional formats alternative experiences, which are typically associated with natural or historical events, Donnelly’s artistic practice dwells in the interstitial spaces between information that is provided and information that ‘flows’ and that, while expanding the emotional and cognitive impact of the information itself, becomes part of an unexpected movement of opening and potentiality. No analytical description of Donnelly’s show at MAMbo – the artist’s first solo exhibition hosted by an Italian museum – can suffice as either its introduction or summary.

Generated on another spatial and temporal level (an audio-video recording of the Baroque Teatro Anatomico at Bologna’s Archiginnasio Library), the show ghostly moves toward and beyond its own spatial area and temporal momentum, working as a sort of a TV or radio broadcasting able to intercepts and shifts on other physical and symbolic plans. In keeping with a certain tradition of institutional critique and Conceptual Art, Donnelly is in favour of a purification of the information that surrounds an exhibition, representing, like her works, an event which cannot be fully deciphered, an experience which requires a limited use of mediated means and standardized expectations (“television versions”) in exchange for more evocative modalities arising from the intimate spheres of perception, memory, intuition. Within such an approach, Donnelly engages herself into what we can define a possible re-load (re-enchantment) of the space-time dimension of the museum, the exhibition and the corollary institutional world. (Television Version)

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March 15, 2009

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