Tacita Dean. STILL LIFE. The studio of Giorgio Morandi - Special project Art City 2024

In 2009 Tacita Dean, one of the more influent character of the contemporary art scene, realized two films on 16mm film inside the apartment of Bologna where Giorgio Morandi lived and worked for most of his life, now Casa Morandi, particularly in the studio spaces. 

One of these, Still Life, is screened inside spazio Pietro at Palazzo Tanari. In the film, shot in black and white, line appear intersecting thickly on the artist's worksheet, as he traced in pencil the exact position of the objects he would paint. Morandi studied carefully the possible variations of the composition, noting them with marks and letters on the large sheets of paper that wrapped around his work table: the outlines overlapped and intersected, giving life to a painting as extraordinary as it was unintentional. 

Through such overlooked and forgotten traces, Tacita Dean tells the story of Morandi's work, reconstructing the constancy and rigor of the preparatory stages. The movie is, in fact, characterized by a meticulously detailed gaze, a special quality of light and a slow tempo, made up of long pauses that reveal of each object, each line, an essence that neither painting nor photography could capture in the same way. 

The English artist introduces us inside universes dense of time and space that retain the truth of the moment, resembling still lifes, ablet in motion