Painting a Pig Head in Font of a Giorgio Morandi

Rainer Ganahl - Painting a Pig Head in Font of a Giorgio Morandi

Bologna 2012 - 20 min

Painting a pig head in front of Giorgio Morandi shows me doing exactly what the title claims: Painting a pig head in front of Giorgio Morandi though I have never painted nor attended any painting classes. I bought some oil paint, some pighead and  put myself infront of an original Morandi painting at Galleria d'Arte Maggiore, Bologna with a sales price of 1 200 000 Euro. Several attemps by me to gain access to either the Museum Morandi or the Studio Morandi - both are open to the pubic - for this work were rejected with the rather curious argument that my project has nothing to do with Morandi.

At the art supply show I still met a person who sold directly to Giorgio Morandi who was shopping there unitl his death in 1964. He advised me not only on the colors and on the canvas but also introduced me to his former boss Carlo Carlotti who worked as a paint saller (Mesticatore) for Morandi between the 1940s and his death. I was also able to interview and get some really nice stories to hear with we recorded in the interview entiteld: TRISTE TRISTE TRISTE - THE PAINT SELLER OF GIORGIO MORANDI.

Girogrio Morandi (1890 - 1964) spent his entrie life in Bologna - almost never left town - and painted apart of some landscape paintings exclusively very reduced still lifes containing bottles and other simple containers in a very uni-colored haze. Given his biography, he participated in WWI and lived through WWII, he saw most of his life poverty and gave expression to it. His paint seller called him 'triste', sad, and described his paintings also as "triste, triste, triste".

Wikipedia describes his style as followed: "Morandi was perceived as one of the few Italian artists of his generation to have escaped the taint of Fascism, and to have evolved a style of pure pictorial values congenial to modernist abstraction. Through his simple and repetitive motifs and economical use of color, value and surface, Morandi became a prescient and important forerunner of Minimalism."

The paintings and the video are part of works that deal with the current state of our economy which can be best described by the financial term CREDIT CRUNCH that started in 2008 with the near collapse of the entire world financial system. Today, Europe too is so endangered of a financial melt down that is not only limited to the defacdto bancrupt Greece but one that also threatens Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland and could even pull down others. The EURO itself is anything but stable and talks about its demise are everywhere.
see more on : ganahl.info/morandipighead.html

rainer ganahl
www.ganahl.info

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• rainer ganahl
• giorgio morandi
• painting
• fine art
• pighead
• still life
• credit crunch
• poerty and painting