Tag: Giorgio di Chirico

Solo Shows

Morandi’s pointed timelessness

Contributed by David Carrier / Giorgio Morandi was born in 1890 and died in 1964. After the 1910s, when his art had some affinities with that of Giorgio de Chirico, he painted only still lives – bottles or flowers – and landscapes. “Time Suspended, part II” at Mattia de Luca Gallery, part I having been staged earlier in Italy, is a blessedly large presentation of 45 paintings and fifteen works on paper that reveals how little other artists or current events – indeed, anything outside of his studio life – affected his work.

Solo Shows

Robert Moskowitz’s visual quartet

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / One thought I had upon seeing Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades at Peter Freeman Inc. was that I could’ve been satisfied to encounter only the large wall of drawings. Arranged loosely yet thoughtfully, in a reconstruction of a wall from the artist’s studio, over sixty works of mostly oil or pastel on paper hang with a kind of majestic poise, each pinned by two thumbtacks in the top corners. Every drawing a vertical, together they present our city: here the finely ridged silhouette of the Empire State Building, there the graceful curve of the Flatiron Building, and, most engrossingly, the dense parallel bars of the World Trade Center from another lifetime ago. Pared down to their essential shapes, the buildings stand resolute in all seasons and moods, whether blue on blue or gray on fleshy pink or black on emerald. Occasionally a hazy ray of moonlight catches a cloud, a hint of atmosphere wafts nearby, or active fingerprints swarm across the paper. These quieter moments play off hard edges in a way that evokes walking home alone after a night out with friends, when New York is at its most still and you feel a flutter of wonder to live in it. What I mean to say is, the wall is a love song to the city.