Mary Ellen Bartley: MORANDI’S BOOKS - Special project Art City 2024

The exhibition of the American photographer Mary Ellen Bartley is part of a practice that has been proven by the Morandi Museum for years now: creating a relation between the work of contemporary artisti and that of Giorgio Morandi, in order to shed new light on the real cultural significance of his work and to reaffirm his prominent role in the global cultural imaginary, as well as his influence on international visual culture. 

After visiting the studio and Morandi's house in 2020, Bartley created a poetic work based on photographs of her personal compositions composed of books that belonged to Morandi and are now on display in the residence of via Fondazza. The books about Corot, Ingres, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Cézanne, which are the teachers of the bolognese Master, became mute interlocutors of the "still lifes" of the photographer, coexisting, at times, alongside objects and tin boxes rescued from the dust of Morandi's studio and ready to come back to life and find a space, that of the photograph, that gives them back an aesthetic dignity as well as a formal value.  

In her methodological approach, Bartley tried to respect all of those aspects like lighting, colors and geometry, so important to Morandi, coming to convey those values of simplicity, silence, peace, order, meditation and reflection to which our society should pay more attention. Giorgio Morandi and Mary Ellen Bartley, two artists distant in time and in their use of expressive medium, but united by their search for essence and by the attention for simple things.