Un Diario Tira L’altro
MARIA MORGANTI

Otto Zoo Gallery is pleased to announce Un diario tira l’altro an exhibition of works by Maria Morganti – curated by Marco Tagliafierro – concentrated entirely on Morganti’s chromatic diaries.

The exhibition consists of 31 paintings, made up of elongated and narrow wooden boards (100×10 cm) where the artist carefully jots down the colours she creates in her studio to use on canvas. For years, not only has Morganti archived her pictorial development, but also has preserved the phenomenological essence of her work. It is her kind of artwork, focused on colour and time, that finds articulation in her chromatic diaries.

Intense, vigorous, temporal, Maria Morganti’s pictorial work develops freely, through repetitive brushwork on canvas. After many days of layering colour, she achieves a monochromatic quality that sums up all the previous colours used, which are still visible in the upper side of the canvas; they appear as narrow strips of colours. Thus, Morganti’s chromatic diaries appear to be the same, even though they are the result of hundreds of different combinations of colours.

Referring to the theme of the diary, the artist has also worked for the past three years on a book, Un diario tira l’altro, published by Corraini in two volumes. The book preview will be held at the opening of the exhibition. In the first volume, Morganti compares her chromatic diaries to the ones created by her father Piero, journalist, writer and trade organizer, active in Milan in the 60’s and 70’s, who unexpectedly passed away in 1995. Morganti compares her chromatic abstraction to her father’s vibrant and personalized artwork; her plotless quality to her father’s narrative quality, which recounts the existential parable of a man. In the second volume, the artist invites other artists and intellectuals to participate in the project and to re-explore the idea of diary. Morganti has dedicated 40 monochromatic canvas (50×60 cm) to those who have participated in the project. These paintings finalize the exhibition. They are to be donated to the contributors, until the wall where the paintings were put on is empty.

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