Until March 2, 2025, the Institut Giacometti in Paris will host the exhibition entitled “Giacometti/Morandi. Moments immobiles”, curated by Francoise Cohen, in collaboration with the Museo Morandi, Musei Civici di Bologna sector. 25 years after the exhibition entitled “Alberto Giacometti, drawings, sculptures and graphic works”, held at the Museo Morandi, this exhibition brings together for the first time the works of two great post-war artists.
Although they were artists far apart from each other, both Alberto Giacometti and Giorgio Morandi explored new artistic dimensions without ever abandoning their identities and, despite never having met, their works share a profound connection.
For both of them, their atelier was a place of reflection and continuous research. For Giorgio Morandi, the atelier in via Fondazza in Bologna represented the refuge of his creativity, for Giacometti in Paris, the rue Hyppolite Maindron.
The retrospective open at the Institut Giacometti in Paris until March 2nd also hosts the reconstruction of Alberto Giacometti's studio preserved by his wife Annette.
The exhibition invites us to reflect on the ways in which everyday experiences and connections with familiar figures and objects have influenced the work of both artists, leading them towards a search for the essential.
Morandi's contemplative life in Bologna and his summers spent in Grizzana fueled his passion for still life. Giacometti's roots in Switzerland were deep, despite living in Paris, and this emerges when scrolling through the figures of his art, from his wife Annette to his brother Diego.
The exhibition brings together works from the Giacometti Foundation and loans from the Morandi Museum in Bologna, creating a chronological calendar that distinguishes the careers of both artists, from 1913 to 1965. The exhibition is divided into four chapters. The first is dedicated to the years of painting in the atelier, a fundamental place for the artistic production of both, the second is represented by the section in which the role of family ties, protagonists of numerous works, is explored. There is also a chapter that brings together the experiences of the two artists in the wake of the avant-garde, on the one hand the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio Morandi, similar to the production of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio De Chirico, on the other the surrealist period of Giacometti. Finally, the section in which the representation of reality is captured in the still lifes of Morandi and in the sculptures of the mature production of Giacometti. The artist, whose first teacher was his father, moved from the Swiss village of Stampa, to which he always remained very close, to Paris where he studied sculpture with Bourdelle and, after an initially cubist phase, became a member of the surrealist movement, from which he separated in 1935, concentrating on the human individual, captured in his existential solitude. While Giacometti achieved worldwide fame during his lifetime, Morandi was celebrated in Italy, but remained, during his life, little known abroad, even in France. International critics in recent decades have understood the extraordinary value of his paintings, present in museums all over the world.