Catherine Wagner's Photographic Homage to Morandi at MAMbo

The exhibition 'In Situ: Traces of Morandi' at MAMbo in Bologna presents 21 pigment prints by American photographer Catherine Wagner (born 1953, San Francisco), created during her 2015–2016 residency in the city. Wagner's still lifes deliberately echo Giorgio Morandi's formal vocabulary but invert his approach: where Morandi saturated light and solidified space around objects, Wagner compresses space and emphasizes transparency. Her images appear as veiled negatives of Morandi's work, with opaque color fields evoking the austerity of his etchings. She methodically classified her works by colored gel filters used in studio lighting, a practice reflected in her didactic titles akin to Morandi's own. The resulting series, 'Shadows,' focuses on dematerialized images of shadows cast by her compositions. The exhibition concludes with two landscapes paying homage to the panorama Morandi painted from his summer studio in Grizzana. The show highlights Wagner's lyrical vision of ephemeral, intangible aesthetics through vibrating, opaque light.