Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin
February 2020
February 25–June 28, 2020 With Giorgio Morandi: Major Works from the Cerruti Collection, the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea continues the in-depth program on the works of the Cerruti Collection. The five paintings by Giorgio Morandi belonging to the collection testify to the variety of pictorial languages of one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century and thus refute the criticism of monotony, thematic and formal, sometimes levied at the artist, instead allowing us to see his ongoing exploration of still life and reduced palette as a meditation on form and perception. The works from the Cerruti Collection allow us to comprehensively retrace the entire chronological span of Giorgio Morandi’s artistic experience. In terms of execution, Morandi’s painting evolves from the significantly chiaroscuro style, rich in tonal modulations, of the 1945 painting Natura morta (Still life), to the opaque surfaces of the 1951 version, created with dense and overlapping brushstrokes. In terms of visual direction, the blocks of color in the 1939 Paesaggio (Landscape) seem almost to oppose the soft light modulation, reminiscent of the fifteenth-century painting of Piero della Francesca, of Fiori (Flowers) of 1954 and Natura morta (Still life) of 1958.
Morandi’s paintings, exhibited in the rooms on the first floor of the Castello di Rivoli, are juxtaposed in dialogue with some of the most significant works of the museum’s collections by artists including Ettore Spalletti, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Maurizio Cattelan, and Emilio Prini, showing the current and uninterrupted relevance of this twentieth-century master.