Maria Morganti  

Un diario tira l’altro

Otto Zoo

Via Vigevano 8 – 20144 Milan

+39 0236535196

info@ottozoo.com

23/11/2010 – 29/01/2011

Tuesday – Saturday, h 2-7 pm

OPENING: Monday, 22 November 2010, h 6,30 pm

Milan, November 2010

Otto Zoo Gallery is pleased to announce Un diario tira l’altro, an exhibition curated by Marco Tagliafierro entirely dedicated to Maria Morganti’s chromatic diaries.

The exhibition consists of 31 paintings, made up of elongated and narrow wooden boards (100x10 cm) where the artist carefully jots down the colours for canvas she has created in studio. For years, not only has Morganti archived her pictorial development, but also has preserved the phenomenological essence of her work. By archiving all her pictorial works, Morganti has preserved over the years the very essence of her working. Her style, so sensible to colour and time, finally emerges from the series of her diaries. Intense, vigorous, and “temporal”, Maria Morganti's painting develops freely, through a repetitive brushwork on canvas. After many days of layering colour, she achieves a monochromatic quality that sums up all the colours so far used, still visible in the upper side of the canvas, like narrow strips of different colours. Thus, Morganti's chromatic diaries appear to be the same, even though they are the result of hundreds of different combinations of colours.

Referring to the theme of the diary, the artist has also worked for the past three years on a book, Un diario tira l’altro, published by Corraini in two volumes. The book preview will be held at the opening of the exhibition. In the first volume, Morganti compares her chromatic diaries to the ones created by her father Piero – a journalist, writer and trade organizer, active in Milan in the 1960s and 1970s, who unexpectedly passed away in 1995. What Morganti basically does is connecting her chromatic abstraction to her father's vibrant and personalized artwork. Also, her “plotless narrative” is related to the contents of her father’s narrative quality, which recounts the existential parable of a man. In the second volume, Morganti invites other artists and intellectuals to participate in the project and re-explore the idea of diary itself. Morganti has dedicated 40 monochromatic canvas (50x60 cm) to those who have been involved into the project. These paintings finalize the exhibition. They are conceived to be donated to the contributors, until the wall which is composed by them will remain empty.

For further information, please contact:

info@ottozoo.com