Giorgio Morandi Cabrita Reis

Sprovieri is delighted to present ‘Giorgio Morandi Cabrita Reis’, the second exhibition at the gallery of Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis together with three still lifes from 1941, 1953 and 1964 by Giorgio Morandi.

 

Cabrita Reis is not interested in contingencies that isolate and/or fragment artworks chronologically or conceptually over the course of history: ‘The work by Morandi has a mysterious quality, an inner silence that has always intrigued me…’

This exhibition is an occasion of contact between two authors from different times and with distinct biographies and this allows us to reflect on the question, ‘...what is exactly contemporaneity, after all? …’ (Pedro Cabrita Reis).

 

Pedro Cabrita Reis was born in 1956 in Lisbon, the city where he currently lives and works. His work has steadily received international acknowledgement, thus becoming crucial and decisive for the understanding of sculpture from the mid 1980’s onwards. His complex work can be characterised by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and installations composed of industrial and found materials and manufactured objects. By using simple materials that are submitted to constructive processes, Pedro Cabrita Reis recycles almost anonymous reminiscences of primordial gestures and actions repeated in everyday life. Centered on questions relative to space and memory, his works gain a suggestive power of association which reaches a metaphorical dimension by going beyond the visual. The complex theoretical and formal diversity of the work of Pedro Cabrita Reis proceeds from an anthropological reflection, which is contrary to the reductionism of sociological discourse. In fact, it is on silences and investigations that his work is based and built on. Cabrita Reis has participated in important international exhibitions, such as documenta 14 and documenta IX in Kassel in 2017 and 1992, the 21st and 24th São Paulo Biennales, respectively in 1994 and 1998, in the Aperto of the Venice Biennale in 1997. In 2003, he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale and participated in the Xème Biennale de Lyon, “The Spectacle of the Everyday”, Lyon, 2009.

Giorgio Morandi (Bologna 1890 - 1964) is one of the most important painters of the XX century. He has been celebrated as the artist of the everyday, admired for his tireless investigation of the still lifes and the quality of solitude and transcendency of the object. He contributed in 1914 to the Prima Mostra Libera Futurista at the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome.

His work was included in several international exhibition, including the Venice Biennale (1928, 1930, 1934 and 1948 when he won the first prize for painting), five times at the Carnegie Prize at Pittsburgh between 1929 and 1939, Winterthur in 1956 which occasioned his first trip abroad and he won the Grand Prize at the 1957 São Paulo Biennale.