With the exhibition Giorgio Morandi: Il tempo sospeso, Galleria Mattia De Luca is continuing its series of exhibitions devoted to the great Italian and international masters of the twentieth century. The exhibition is curated by Marilena Pasquali, the founder and director of the Centro Studi Giorgio Morandi in Bologna, and put on in partnership with the Centro Studi Morandi and with the patronage of the City of Rome and the Municipality of Grizzana Morandi. The event consists of two stages: from 30 April to 2 July 2022, the gallery in Rome will put on an exhibition with masterpieces painted by Morandi over the course of forty years, from the 1920s to the early 1960s; and in the autumn the gallery in New York will host an even broader anthological exhibition, together with a wide selection of works on paper. About forty paintings and works on paper, be shown in Rome, retracing Morandi’s artistic career and helping expand our understanding of his “difficult and secret” art, to paraphrase Cesare Brandi. The intense juxtaposition of some of Morandi’s “variants” points to some new critical insights, as does the display of some unpublished documents that have recently emerged from the family archives. Giorgio Morandi: Il tempo sospeso shows how, as a man and as an artist, Morandi was firmly anchored to the twentieth century: a man who lived through two world wars and experienced the full impact of disillusionment, the loss of certainties, and the collapse of all beliefs. To stem the loss of human direction he sought a mental order, a harmony of form, a material that could become light. And yet he never lost the thrill of uncertainty, as we see in his every work in the form of expectancy and suspension. The curator Marilena Pasquali describes the power of Morandi’s art like this: “Putting reality in parentheses in order to experience it. Keeping at a distance from the world in order to inhabit it, and to accept it without losing the autonomy of one’s thoughts and the humanity of one’s behaviour. Insisting on the importance of suspension, the need for waiting, the necessity of detachment.” And she continues, saying: “Rarely has an artist managed to convey all this – reason and sentiment fused together – as Giorgio Morandi did with his compositions of objects, his glimpses of nature, and his silk flowers. Images that appear to be so ‘neutral’ but that are actually so forceful. So empty of humans and so full of humanity. Morandi is an artist ‘on the brink’, always poised on the threshold of a time and a world that are changing at untold speed and, as such, he is now more necessary than ever, in these times that are so difficult and so fast, so elusive and so often incomprehensible.”  The exhibitions in Rome and New York will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by the curator and other scholars, writers and artists. It will also include illustrations of both exhibitions, the previously unpublished archival documents, and accounts of the life and work of Giorgio Morandi specially studied and analysed for this project.       

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