Morandi and Dean in Dialogue at Palazzo Te, Mantua

Palazzo Te in Mantua hosts a daring exhibition pairing two films by Tacita Dean with about fifty works by Giorgio Morandi, challenging the notion of simplicity evoked by the Bolognese artist's life. Rather than a retrospective or monographic reading, the show continues a discourse begun with the 2001 Morandi exhibition at the same venue. Mayor Mattia Palazzi described it as a collective effort and a clear direction for the city, which was Italy's Capital of Culture in 2017. The exhibition includes rare loans from private collections and a section on Morandi's bibliography and readings. Dean's two films, made in 2009 in Morandi's studio on Via Fondazza, reappropriate his aesthetic canons, capturing light and silence through controlled repetition. In "Still Life," inspired by a drawing from the Museo Morandi showing how the artist traced object perimeters like an architect, Dean slowly pans to animate Morandi's creative process. In "Day for Night," a calibrated, stark filming of dusty objects becomes an aesthetic intuition blending familial intimacy and enigmatic distance, inviting viewers to discover what a contemporary gaze can reveal as art itself.