The 57th Venice Biennale will start in a couple of weeks' time and, if you're heading there and looking for a place where you may have a break while still enjoying art head to the café designed by architect Mario Botta at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia to check out Maria Morganti's installation "Development of a Painting".
Created for the café, this compact project revolves around colours and textiles: the walls of this space will be covered in fabric pieces developed in close association with textile manufacturer Bonotto, established in 1912.
The core idea for this installation comes from a previous artwork: in 2008 Morganti produced the painting "Quadro per la Sala dell'800" taking inspiration from the Querini Stampalia collections. During each of her visits she picked a colour from a different work of art, starting with the flower in the hair of Alessandro Milesi's "La Modella" (1910; View this photo). Morganti kept on collecting various colours and reproduced them one by one as a layer of painting on her canvas. Her painting is therefore the result of the superimposition of these shades.
The artist preserved on cards the sequence of these chromatic layers that - she points out - weren't created by her, since she merely discovered and highlighted them.
Invited by Chiara Bertola to create a new permanent installation for the café, Morganti decided to return to the work she had created in 2008 and to her diary of brushstrokes.
Morganti added two further dimensions to her research, first of all an architectural one: Botta's design characterised by a grey ceiling and floor end up wrapping and containing Morganti's coloured surfaces on the walls.
Then she added another twist to her project via Bonotto's textiles: the artists attempted indeed a comparison between the colours on her canvases and Bonotto's practice of creating the fabric through a warp and a weft. She therefore developed a fabric with Giovanni Bonotto composed of many different threads which together create a single colour.
From a distance, the textile canvases look like large monochrome works, but a closer look will reveal that the colour consists of numerous nuances.
This gesture forces the visitors to explore a texture from close up, meditating about the power of colours and the juxtaposition between the work of an artist and that a textile manufacturer.
Morganti also envisages this permanent installation as a cyclical work: the installation is completed in its entirety after climbing up to the second floor and returning to see Morganti's work in the 19th century room of the museum.
Maria Morganti's "Development of a Painting" is at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252, Venice, from 14 May 2017.
Image credits for this post
1. Maria Morganti
Stratification with amazonite, 2017
Photograph by Daniele Zoico
2. Maria Morganti
From Querini to Castelvecchio
Castelvecchio, Verona 2010
Photograph by Francesco Allegretto
3. Maria Morganti
Travel Diary. Pellestrina, 6 - 15 August 2016
4. Maria Morganti
Sedimentation 2015 #4
Photograph by Francesco Allegretto
5. Maria Morganti
Sedimentation 2014 #4
Photograph by Francesco Allegretto
6. Maria Morganti for Bonotto
Comments