D’après nature: Giorgio Morandi / Cy Twombly
December 7, 2023 – May 5, 2024
Villa d'Este, Tivoli

From the press release

The Villa Adriana and Villa d'Este Institute – VILLÆ presents the exhibition D'après nature: Giorgio Morandi / Cy Twombly in the rooms of Villa d'Este in Tivoli from December 7, 2023 to May 5, 2024. The important exhibition project is part of the 2023/24 programming of the Institute dedicated to a reflection on landscape in contemporary times and anticipates the forthcoming prestigious exhibition dedicated to the importance of Villa d'Este in the history of art and in the iconography of the Grand Tour next spring.

A place of transformation and integration between nature and the work of man, the Tiburtine site welcomes and reflects the most intimate aspects of the works of art by the two great masters of the twentieth century, ideally united by the decorated Renaissance ambience of which the walls of the rooms of Villa d'Este are entirely covered. For both artists there is the use of a sort of minimal alphabet to express reality in essential ways, thus coming to a language which goes beyond mere retinal data.

Morandi's themes are in fact phenomenological due to their minimal change in form: the landscape always contributes to confirm the same different present, revealing, with imperceptible declinations and variables, the soul and essence of everyday life which reverberates in his studio and in his beloved Apennines. In the same way, in Twombly’s work, we witness the decoding of reality through a photographic language made of quick frames, which stage an intimate diary with strong biographical characterization. The light, the blurred shapes of the details are the compositional coordinates of one fragmentary image, transient, fragile in its immediacy.

The exhibition, born from the collaboration with the Morandi Museum | Museums sector Civici of Bologna, the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome, with the help of Cristian Grasu, and the contribution of private loans, intends to investigate the sensitivity and “sentimental” affinity which characterizes the naturalistic canon of these two great masters: Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 – 1964) and Cy Twombly (Lexington, 1928 - Rome, 2011). Thus paintings, watercolors and drawings of the former, as well as photographic images and archive documents of the latter are here proposed in a dialogue.

For further information:
Villa d'Este, Tivoli (Italy)
villae.cultura.gov.it