SIEGEN.- Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964 in Bologna) is known for his still-life works and landscape paintings. Throughout his life, he focused on depicting simple, everyday objects such as bottles, jugs, vases, and bowls.In his paintings and drawings, he constantly varied the arrangement of objects so that, despite the compositions being similar, no two images are exactly alike. They are reduced to the rich quietness of basic forms. It is precisely in the repetitions of these same objects that the slight distinctions are highlighted as striking phenomena. This tension between repetition and difference was what brought attention to Morandi, one of the great loners of modern painting.

The retrospective exhibition Giorgio Morandi: Resonances at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen explores Morandi’s standout position in the art of the last 80 years. It shows more than 80 works by the painter, ranging from his early work in the 1920s through to the 1960s. The presentation begins with the extensive Morandi holdings in the Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection, supplementing these with loans from other German and European collections. At the same time, the exhibition embraces Morandi’s own principle and sets the images in a dialogue with older and more recent works by other artists, including Josef Albers, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Gustave Caillebotte, Tacita Dean, Walter Dexel, Peter Dreher, Raoul Dufy, Lucian Freud, Cornelis Jacobsz Delff, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Simone Nieweg, Franziska Reinbothe, Willem de Rooij, Karl Peter Röhl, Cy Twombly and Jan van der Velde.

Showing a total of over 100 works, the exhibition itself will create echoes of individual motifs and images by revealing links through similarities and highlighting differences.

Curator: Christian Spies

Giorgio Morandi, long recognized as one of the great nonconformists of modern Italian painting, cultivated a life and practice defined by deliberate retreat. Working in quiet seclusion in Bologna, he focused almost exclusively on three subjects—still lifes, landscapes, and flowers—approaching each as a lifelong “exercise” in attentive seeing. His small bedroom-studio on Via Fondazza, shared with his three sisters, became a kind of monastic cell where bowls, bottles, jars, and vases were endlessly rearranged into new configurations. Morandi embraced an ascetic rhythm of work that rejected the noise of the outside world, allowing his reduced forms to emerge through concentration, patience, and contemplation.

The exhibition Giorgio Morandi: Resonances takes this disciplined, iterative approach as its central lens, revealing how Morandi’s modest subjects produce a surprising depth of visual and emotional impact. The show argues that Morandi was not a mystic conjuring images from thin air, but a methodical observer who worked with the precision of a scientist. By repeatedly adjusting the placement of the same humble objects—sometimes by only a millimeter—he uncovered subtle relationships that bring each composition to life: the moment a jug’s shadow breaks at the edge of a table, or the way a hedge seems to “speak” to a neighboring house. These fleeting interactions, the exhibition proposes, form the “resonances” that give Morandi’s work its enduring power.

While the concept of resonance is borrowed from music, where notes reverberate to create lingering harmonies, the exhibition expands it into a broader, cross-artistic dialogue. More than eighty of Morandi’s paintings, drawings, and prints are placed in conversation with historical and contemporary works by artists such as Josef Albers, Tacita Dean, Lucian Freud, Sol LeWitt, and On Kawara. Through these juxtapositions, the exhibition shows how Morandi’s principles—repetition, variation, reduction, and concentrated looking—echo across painting, photography, and sculpture. The gallery itself becomes a resonant field in which images, motifs, and ideas reverberate across time.

A key theme of the exhibition is Morandi’s deep investment in ordinary objects and simple forms. His Natura Morta works are built from chipped pitchers, dusty bottles, and patched vases—objects he collected obsessively, repainted to match his muted palette, and returned to again and again. His working process was highly structured: objects were sorted on the studio floor, then elevated to intermediate shelves, and finally to the tabletop, where he spent days refining their positions. This ritualistic movement from abundance to reduction reflects Morandi’s larger artistic philosophy: meaning arises not from spectacle, but from disciplined attention to the essential.

The exhibition also expands beyond still lifes into landscapes and prints, highlighting Morandi’s engagement with modernism and his distinctive variations within it. His landscapes from Bologna and Grizzana reduce buildings, trees, and hills to simplified color blocks and quiet contrasts, inspired by Cézanne, the Cubists, and the early Renaissance. His role as a professor of graphic art foregrounds his mastery of line—used alternately as contour, structure, and spatial vibration—in drawings and etchings. Even his smallest group of works, the flower still lifes, shows how Morandi transformed a traditionally ornate genre into muted, contemplative studies using artificial, often cemetery-style flowers that would not wilt before he could finish painting them.

Ultimately, Giorgio Morandi: Resonances positions the artist not as a solitary eccentric, but as a central figure whose disciplined methods anticipated later conceptual strategies. His constant negotiation between repetition and difference finds parallels in the serial rigor of On Kawara’s Date Paintings or Peter Dreher’s thousands of water-glass studies. The exhibition offers not only a retrospective of Morandi’s extraordinary sensitivity to form, color, and time, but also an invitation to visitors: to slow down, to look closely, and to experience how the simplest objects—rearranged, reconsidered, and revisited—can produce endlessly unfolding meaning.