Still Life

Still Life is an original black and white etching by Giorgio Morandi in 1946.

Hand signed in pencil on lower right and with the printed signature and date on plate on lower left. 

Numbered in pencil on the lower left. Edition of 65 (18/65).

Includes gilded frame

This Still Life is composed by four elements that are inscribed in a round. The enlightenment isn’t concentrate, but it’s diffused. In this etching by Morandi, dated 1946 and showing a Circular Still Life with Bottle and Three Objects, diffused light bathes the entire composition instead of focusing on single elements. The artist succeeds in freeing the objects chosen as the subjects of his works from their everyday reality and manages to ignore the traditional rules of perspective and lighting in depicting them.  Every object becomes a plastic entity in a whole wherein the various components of the scene are used as instruments in a rational and organic construction.

Reference : published in the general catalogue "The graphic work of Giorgio Morandi" by L. Vitali, No. 113

Born in Bologna in 1890, Giorgio Morandi is one of the most representative figures of 20th Century Italian art. Morandi’s vocation for engraving was not something that surfaced when he reached artistic maturity. It progressed in parallel with his painting.

The engraver grew alongside the painter, as shown by the fact that his first plates, now lost together with many of his paintings from that period, go back to the year 1911, when Morandi was just 21 years old.

“…For Morandi, an etching was not just a picture on a metal plate, half waybetween a hastily jotted note and a brilliant aside, and with all the appearance of having been improvised. For him, etchings were things that could not have been produced any other way, things that you thought about deeply, sought after and pondered. Adventuredidn’t come into it, nor did hopingfor the best, with the help of chance and the unpredictable effects of acid  […] Morandi’s engravings stem from a profound meditation on his subjects, maturing in his mind long before he started etching.” (Lamberto Vitali,L’opera graficadi Giorgio Morandi (Giorgio Morandi’s graphic works, Einaudi, Turin 1957).