MARIA MORGANTI

Pronuncia i tuoi colori/ Pronounce your colours

Curated by Francesca Pasini

Via Vigevano 8 – 20144 Milano

Tel. +39 02 36535196 - info@ottozoo.com

25 March – 16 May 2015

Wednesday-Saturday, h 2-7 pm

Milan, March 2015

OTTO ZOO presents Pronuncia i tuoi colori, a show by Maria Morganti curated by Francesca Pasini; it is open to the public from 25 March to 16 May 2015.

For Maria Morganti "... Colour is a physical, intimate experience: at times I have the sensation that it comes from within me, as though I were a medium for it", as she herself states in the essay that Francesca Pasini has written for the exhibition. Colour is the material from which experience is made and which, by being formed in a bowl and deposited every day on the canvas, leaves a tangible trace of the passing of time.

After the show Un diario tira l'altro, held on the occasion of the publishing of a book about her colour diaries, which was paired with the diaries written by her father (the journalist Piero Morganti, 1931-1995), Pronuncia i tuoi colori is the second solo show of the artist at the OTTO ZOO gallery. The show results from an idea by Francesca Pasini, according to whom "you cannot describe colours, but only pronounce them", while Maria Morganti has said, "colour can be made visible only by making it exist".

Pasini has written, "Maria's paintings are far distant from monochrome abstraction; they endorse personal affairs, affections, meetings, intimate and consequential occasions [...].An indissoluble bond where the traces are always an accumulation consisting of stratifications, of sedimentations, and of melding, and it is not by chance that these are the titles of her works".

The itinerary of the show has been conceived by relating together various ways of understanding colour by the artist: the Sedimentazioni (2010-2013), paintings formed by superimposing one layer of colour over another and leaving visible on the upper border all the painting's history, and represented here by the large canvases that compose the Polittico a ritroso (2013); the Grumi (2013), sponges soaked in the same colours deposited on the canvases of the polyptych, and where the colours now create lumps and become tangible; the Accelerazioni (2013), paintings that begin and end in a single day, and where the colour, not having had the time to dry, meld into a single material; the Stratificazioni (2010-2013), layers of modelling clay extended on wooden panels and which for the artist help our perception of the materiality of colour; and the Impastamenti (2013), where the layers of modelling clay are extended on a panel day after day and which are suddenly kneaded together.

On show are also Nei masegni (2013), a photograph that records a section of the modelling clay Stratificazioni that Maria had pressed between the paving stones in front of her mother's house in Venice. And, finally, Impronta (2010-2012), the cover of the work-table in her studio, and which contained the traces of the crayons used in her Carte-Diario.

Maria Morganti (Milan, 1965) lives and works in Venice. She graduated from the Brera academy in Milan and also went to the New York Studio School. She has exhibited her work in solo shows in such institutions as: Casa Testori, Novate Milanese (MI), 2014; Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, 2010; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, 2008; Via Farini, Milan, 2007; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, 2006. She has also held solo shows in international galleries: Florence Lynch Gallery, New York; Galerie S65, Cologne; Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris; OTTO ZOO, Milan; and Caterina Tognon, Venice. Among group shows, mention should be made of: Autoritratti, Iscrizioni del femminile nell'arte italiana contemporanea, MAMbo, curated by Uliana Zanetti and Francesca Pasini, various authors, Bologna, 2012; Fig. 1: Paesaggio, Spazio A, Mac, Monsummano, curated by Cecilia Canziani and Ilaria Gianni, Pistoia, 2013; Visioni. La fortezza plurale dell'arte, Fortezza Borbonica, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Umberto Palestini, Civitella del Tronto, 2012, Teramo; Sentimiento Nuevo, curated by Davide Ferri and Antonio Grulli, MAMbo, Bologna, 2011.
In 2010 she issued Un diario tira l’altro (published by Corraini), an artist's book in the form of a diary.

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