Development of a Painting by Maria Morganti

Development of a Painting, the permanent installation created for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia café curated by Chiara Bertola. The Querini Stampalia art projects are developed in and for the Fondazione space, because it considers the place primarily as a substance and subject, capable of ex- pressing the role of an institute that aims to act in relation to its time.

The mission of the place is for it to be permeated by other perspectives, without becom- ing crystallised in a single form, to illustrate the dialogue between the languages of art and the public. Over the years there have been numerous artists who have worked with the memory of the museum, not only the contemporary and experimental space redesigned by Carlo Scarpa, but also the palace’s sixteenth-century façade.

Considering the Fondazione’s affirmative critical and curatorial mindset regarding con- temporary art, it was therefore natural to invite Maria Morganti to produce a work for the café designed by the architect Mario Botta, whom the artist measures herself against for the project Development of a Painting. The permanent installation involves the walls of this space, which are covered in fabric created and developed in close association with Bonotto, one of the most creative textile manufactur- ers in the world.
The idea originated from the Quadro per la Sala dell’800 which Maria Morganti paint- ed in 2008 during her visits to the museum collections. 

Taking her cue from the colours of the paintings exhibited – and in particular from the flower in the hair of Alessandro Milesi’s La Modella (1910), as though it were the palette on which the painter reflected on his colours – over the course of each visit the artist ‘collected’ a colour, taking it with her to her studio and materialising it in a layer of paint on the canvas. Her painting is the result of the superimposition of these experiences. The artist conserved on cards the sequence of these chromatic layers. In her work Maria Morganti proceeds as follows: “I don’t make the colour, I find it. I don’t invent it, I don’t plan it, I don’t produce it, I do not reproduce it…I tend towards it. I listen to it and I see it come into being. I see it being born on the canvas.” 

What has inspired Maria Morganti in this project is relating, harmony, searching for similarities, likenesses and not differences, an awareness that by starting from points of contact, from an adherence to another experience, new juxtapositions can be created. When her internal system converges with an external system that has similarities with what she does, a short circuit is created and acts on a common ground where diverse subjects can recognise each other. This is what happened with the textile manufacturer Bonotto, which Morganti was able to work with empathetically. The challenge was to add a new ‘layer’ to the Querini collection and at the same time a new ‘layer’ to the Bonotto textile collection.

Maria Morganti

Development of a Painting

Project for the Mario Botta café 

at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia 

Textiles by Bonotto

Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Campo Santa Maria Formosa 

Castello 5252, Venice

from 14 May 2017: 10am-7pm 

(closed Mondays)

www.querinistampalia.org

(photo by Maria Morganti, Courtesy Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venezia)