Alessandra Spranzi | Casa Morandi

Casa Morandi hosts the exhibition Alessandra Spranzi. Il quale cerca solamente la sua bellezza, curated by Lorenzo Balbi, a project presented during Arte Fiera in collaboration with Galleria P420 Bologna.

In the spaces of Casa Morandi, the Bologna residence on via Fondazza where Giorgio Morandi lived for most of his life, Alessandra Spranzi (Milan, 1962, lives and works in Milan) brings together the evocative atmospheres of her works with those of the house and the works of Giorgio Morandi.

Spranzi’s artistic research is connected to photography, the staging of photographs, the reuse of her own and others' photographic images, collage, and “photography of photographs.” Her work reflects a taste for humble materials, everyday, domestic situations, neglected and obsolete objects, manual labor, and the gestures that accompany them. Through these tools and subjects, through even the smallest appropriations and manipulations, the artist continues to question the mystery of existence and the fundamental forces that shape our destiny, as well as the destiny of the objects and environments that surround us.

The ten unpublished photographs exhibited in this show, taken from the series Sul tavolo #80 (2014-2024), all focus on the same subject and explore repetition as a tool to deepen the sense of time and observation. The protagonists of the photographs—a page featuring a work by Giorgio Morandi from the monograph on the artist curated by Arnaldo Beccaria in 1939 for the Hoepli editions, and a copper pipe found on the street—become pretexts to go “beyond” the visible. Each print stands out with subtle variations of color and light, inviting the audience to slow and reflective observation. Repetition, far from being a mere formal exercise, becomes a means to reach a metaphysical dimension, where the focus is "the thought or forms that are saved in the luminous distance."

The artist emphasizes how the discovery of the original negative, never printed before, triggered a creative process: “In the attempt to create a proper print, Il quale cerca solamente la sua bellezza, nel modo qui descritto takes shape.” In these photographs, themes such as silence, light, and repetition find common ground with the Morandian universe, creating a bridge between two artistic sensibilities united by a deep attention to the essence of things.

Also featured in the exhibition is the video Metronomo, non farlo (2023), in which the protagonist is a coffee cup placed on a table, balanced by an underlying knife, with its movement marked by a metronome. The objects come to life; they are not only observed, but observe and participate in the search for balance, immersed in an atmosphere of multiple sounds, yet still minimal.