While waiting for the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024, Maggiore gam Project Room is pleased to announce the reopening to the public of the exhibition “Giorgio Morandi. The balance of signs” hosted inside the Morandiana Library, in the splendid setting of ACP - Palazzo Franchetti. The exhibition, successfully inaugurated in the summer of 2023, is reopened following the extraordinary enthusiasm and interest shown by the public. The choice to extend accessibility will allow an even greater number of enthusiasts and curious people to immerse themselves in Giorgio Morandi's artistic universe and appreciate his poetics and refined engraving technique.“Giorgio Morandi. The balance of signs” highlights the most authentic research of the Bolognese Master through the lens of his works on paper – etchings, drawings and watercolors – to which he dedicated himself with excellent technical expertise and poetic vein for his entire career. The exhibition explores the main subjects that characterized his work: the landscapes of his hometown, the refined flower vases and, above all, the still lifes that accompanied him throughout his life, always in perfect balance between delicate and intense signs chiaroscuro.

Alongside the precious volumes available for consultation in the Morandiana Library, a place in which to delve into Giorgio Morandi's poetics in a transversal and current way, the exhibition highlights the Master's most authentic research. Etchings, drawings and watercolors become silent, but powerful revealers of one of the cornerstones of his art: suggesting a poetic universe through a studied parsimony not only of subjects, but also of signs. It is in these works that the evocative capacity of Morandi's intimate and thoughtful world manifests itself even more in its essentiality: in the etchings with the chromatic play limited to the contrast between the engraved sign and the paper, between the hatching and the spaces deliberately left white in the composition; in the drawings with the pencil that leaves its imprint always light and fast and yet eternal; in watercolors with color alone capable of defining shapes, volumes and spaces.

Giorgio Morandi began to dedicate himself to engraving as early as 1910-11, developing the language and contents that would accompany him for the rest of his life. Despite the economy of the subjects, the still lifes and landscapes that characterize his artistic career are characterized by an ever-changing expressive intensity: it is a question of thoroughly investigating all the possible formal balances, the tonal variations that the different degrees of chiaroscuro manage to achieve give back, thus achieving always different and always excellent results. It is no coincidence that Morandi is considered one of the greatest engravers of the twentieth century and in 1930 he was called to take on the role of teacher of engraving techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, a position that was renewed until 1956. Morandi never subordinated the art of graphics to that of painting. Starting from the Venice Biennale of 1928, the year in which he participated for the first time, Morandi selected his engravings to present his research to the international audience of the Biennale. Over the years, the rendering remains sublime, just as the desire to thoroughly investigate the objects and places that surround him continues: it involves varying the tonal gradations, calibrating the texture of the hatching depending on the case, experimenting with always different compositions based on the bright reflections. The expertise and mastery with which Morandi continued to conduct his work earned him, in 1953, the international recognition of the Grand Prize for Engraving at the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.