Maria Morganti

The exhibition

curated by Elena Volpato

Spazio del Contemporaneo

Inauguration 29 October 2024, 6 pm, Ostension #1 performance 6:15 pm 

GAM is pleased to present the first major anthological exhibition of Maria Morganti's work with a wide selection of works created between 1988 and 2024.

The exhibition traces an itinerary through the work of Maria Morganti whose work finds its origin in the essentiality of the pictorial gesture, in its repetition and expansion over time. Hers is an undertaking that has developed steadily over the years, to the point of outlining an architecture of thought, a space of work and storage, a physical and mental place – the artist’s studio – where time is given shape through the simplicity of daily acts that, by slow stratification and accumulation, compose the complex chromatic diary of an existence.

The heart of Morganti's studio moves to the centre of the GAM exhibition space. Called Gestureplace, it is a work in itself, and comprises the Sedimentary – a structure that contains all the paintings in the Sedimentations series – the Diarythèque – in which all the works called Diaries are collected – and the Infinite Painting– a painting that the artist has been making every day, layer by layer, since 2006. All the elements are arranged around the platform on which the artist moves during her work.

For years, every day, as soon as I arrive at the studio, the first thing I do is to take my camera and head to the fondamenta – the lane by the canal – next door. Here I always photograph the same spot. Then I go back inside, put on my work apron and go to the bowl. I make a colour and with it I perform three actions. I spread it on three surfaces: on the ‘Infinite Painting’, the ‘Diary’ and a ‘Sedimentation’. (Morganti, 2013)

On the evening of the inauguration, 29 October 2024, moving around the Gestureplace, two young artists, Melania Fusco and Marta Magini, who have worked with Morganti for a long time, will perform Ostension #1: the extraction of all the Sedimentations and Diaries painted by her in twenty years of daily work in the studio, and their placement on the walls of the exhibition space, to form a long timeline composed of canvases juxtaposed one against the other. At the end of the performance, what will remain will be the Emptying – of the Gestureplace in its bare structure, set at the centre of the space, and all around, a long chromatic tale. Starting at 6.15 p.m., the Ostension #1 performance will take place; a double visit to the exhibition at two different times during the evening is recommended in order to appreciate the change in the arrangement of the works displayed.

Ostension #1 is an exhibition within the exhibition, a crowded core of works that gives the entire exhibition a centripetal motion to which the rest of the exhibition itinerary responds, and which is modulated instead in a sort of pulsation between moments of rarefaction in which the painting, drawings and other works are dispersed within the silence of a large white space, and moments of ‘thickening’, where the visitor's gaze and very body are drawn into the pictorial matter.

What emerges from the exhibition is a distinctive feature of Morganti's work: a deep connection with colour that becomes the raw material of her soul. The bottom of the bowl, in which the artist creates a new colour every day without letting it dry for years, mirrors this. Her repeated gestures are the assumption of a legacy whose origins lie in the school of colour and in the liquidity of the painting tradition of Venice, where Morganti has her studio. In the exhibition and in the exhibition spaces of the GAM collection, her work of confronti – comparisons – with the masters of the past and her ability to respond and make their works resonate with her own colour will be made clear, making her Diaries and Sedimentations speak of both everyday time and historical time.

The exhibition continues the focus and study that the Museum has dedicated in recent years to contemporary Italian art, a focus that it will continue to dedicate in the programming to come: the exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Corraini of Mantua, with texts by Elena Volpato, curator of the exhibition, Chiara Bertola, Director of GAM, and Cristina Baldacci, lecturer in contemporary art history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice and a scholar of the archive understood as a metaphor and art form.

The exhibition dedicated to Maria Morganti is also an opportunity to present the work Fragment #1, acquired thanks to funds made available by the Contemporary Creativity Directorate General of the Ministry of Culture, through the public notice PAC 2024 - Plan for Contemporary Art. GAM's victory, for the fourth consecutive year, has also enabled GAM to acquire for its collections 5 Five Canvases for Querini, a single nucleus of 5 canvases with which Morganti has explored the pictorial values of the Venetian colour tradition and which are exhibited in a dedicated room within the new layout of the permanent collections on the first floor of the museum.

We would like to thank Barbara Garatti of the Archivio Maria Morganti and the Galleria de' Foscherari in Bologna for their valuable collaboration.

Maria Morganti was born in Milan in 1965. She trained in Milan and New York, where she studied at the New York Studio School and New York University. She has lived and worked in Venice since 1992.

She has exhibited in numerous solo shows in museums, including at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice in 2006, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice in 2008 and the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona in 2010, as well as participating in group shows at the Kunstverein in Ludwisburg in 2006, the MAMbo in Bologna in 2013, the Testori Foundation in Novate Milanese in 2014, the Real Academia de España in Rome in 2015, the GAM – Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin in 2017, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome in 2021 and the Milan Triennale in 2023. She has published numerous books including: Storia di un quadro (Corraini, 2006); Il colore succede, non si provoca (Corraini, 2016) in collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy; Diari tra diari, (Fondazione Spinola per l'arte, GAM Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino, Viaindustriae Publishing, 2019).

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