Lucas Schoormans Gallery is pleased to announce Giorgio Morandi: Paintings and Works on Paper. This is the gallery’s second Morandi exhibition and expresses our interest in the continued evaluation of his work and its place in history. The exhibition revolves around a group of paintings, two of which are a pair from the late 1940’s and until recently unknown. The pair, subdued in their palette and dense in composition, appears to evoke aptly the tentative mood of post-war Europe. Though Morandi has worked in series, subtlety changing composition and tonalities from one painting to the next, it is rare to see works so closely related next to each other.

A group of etchings and drawings on view complements the paintings. Morandi’s skillful etchings awarded him great recognition during his lifetime and draw frequent comparisons to those of Rembrandt. The artist employs cross-hatching to achieve ever loser compositions of layered shades of gray to embody the volumes of still lifes or landscapes. The play between light and dark parallels his drawings’ fluid line and use of negative space.

Morandi’s oeuvre and its persistent exploration of one predominant subject, the still life places him next to Cezanne and Giacometti and illustrates his influence on some of his contemporaries and artists of later generations. His landscapes, though less in number, nonetheless achieve remarkable distillations of space and highlight his concern with abstraction.

It becomes evident that regardless of the medium employed, the chosen subject remains secondary to this artist’s explorations of space, volume, and color.