Albano Morandi “Rosa non è la Rosa”
APRIL 5 - JUNE 15
Opening Saturday, April 5, 6 p.m.
At the inauguration meeting with artist Flaminio Gualdoni and Ilaria Bignotti.
Pink as a novel of little thing
Like the surrender that emerges above the face
Like the wait that on the lips weighs
Pink is not the rose I bring to you
(Vinicio Capossela, With a Rose, 2000)
Saturday, April 5 at 6 p.m. opens the new exhibition season of the Toscolano Maderno Paper Museum with an exhibition by Albano Morandi entitled “Rosa non è la Rosa.”
A series of works created by Albano Morandi between 2023 and 2024 will be presented in the museum's evocative rooms dedicated to temporary exhibitions. On display are found papers, deeds, manuscripts, letters, on which the artist intervenes by inserting a sign, a poetic act that gives new life to a forgotten story, now fixed and enriched with a new and personal language. The artist's mark is identified in flowers, leaves and natural elements, charged with a color that is life, the passing of time, memory and history. Albano Morandi's is an act that averts oblivion by appropriating, as the artist states, “...a memory, making visible lost functions through an enhancement of the aesthetic message.” Accompanying the exhibition is an artist's book, limited edition, published by Tommaso Cascella for Cervo Volante Edizioni. In addition to reproductions of the works, the volume features poems by William Blake, Garcìa Lorca, Gianni Rodari, to name a few.
Albano Morandi (Salò, 1958), is an artist, set designer and committed cultural promoter. He has been Lecturer of Scenography, Painting and Art Didactics courses at the Cignaroli Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, the L.A.B.A and SantaGiulia in Brescia.
A graduate in Scenography from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, under the guidance of Toti Scialoja and Alberto Boatto, in 1984 he inaugurated his first solo exhibition of watercolors on paper, or rice paper mounted on walls, at the Santelmo Art Center in Salò.
In 1986 he participated in the XI Quadriennale in Rome where he presented the Formichieri Trampolieri, a series in which the absolute protagonist is a white creature that the artist portrays now in front, now from above, now from the side, always against a black background. Between 1987 and 1988 he began to create his first sculptural objects: Disegno Capitello Colonna.
In the early 1990s Kamikaze appeared, more object-based works in reference to the supports the artist prefers for these works: tables, boxes, pallets.
In 1994, the first large installations begin to come to life, and in 1996, at the XII Quadriennale in Rome, he exhibited Officium, an imposing wall installation made up of a multitude of pictorial objects accompanied by six sculptures arranged in a row on a plinth.
Thus began the Gesti Quotidiani, small recycled objects, old frames, blackboards, found notebooks, empty wooden or cardboard boxes of any shape, supports that he himself builds with materials always rigorously recovered, and that like a collector he collects, preserves, and reworks bringing them to “new life.”
Morandi uses these objects, emptied of their function, to show them to the viewer as sculpture-forms, often seeking simple aesthetic pleasure.
In 1986 and 1996 he was invited to the Quadriennale in Rome, in 2000 he won the first prize ex-aequo at the 40th Premio Nazionale d'Arte Suzzara, and in 2007 he participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale in the collateral events “Joseph Beuys Difesa della Natura.”
Since 2003, he has been directing Meccaniche della Meraviglia, a major contemporary art exhibition review on the territory of the province of Brescia.
He has held over 150 exhibitions in major European cities, Asia and the United States. For over twenty-five years he has curated exhibitions on behalf of the Province, the Municipality of Brescia and other territorial entities. Among his most important theatrical and performance collaborations are those with Composers Antonio Giacometti, Giancarlo Facchinetti and Francesco Pennisi; with musicians Tristan Honsinger, Gianluigi Trovesi, Luca Formentini and Walter Beltrami; with Poets Attilio Lolini and Flavio Ermini; and with Directors Lorenzo Vitalone, Mariano D'Ammacco and Mauro Avogadro.