Gianni Berengo Gardin photographs Giorgio Morandi’s studio

PERUGIA | NATIONAL GALLERY OF UMBRIA
FROM 23 MAY TO 28 SEPTEMBER 2025

The exhibition also features two works by Giorgio Morandi on loan from the Morandi Museum in Bologna.

The CAMERA OSCURA project makes its way into the atelier of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, observing it through the lens of an unquestioned master of photography.

From 23 May to 28 September 2025, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia will be hosting the exhibition “Gianni Berengo Gardin photographs Giorgio Morandi’s studio”, curated by Alessandra Mauro, in the CAMERA OSCURA space dedicated to photography that has been set up as part of the experience of visiting the museum.

The exhibition brings together 21 of the most significant shots taken by Gianni Berengo Gardin (Santa Margherita Ligure, 1930) in 1993, when he was asked to make a documentary record of the places where the great painter from Emilia worked, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Morando Museum in Bologna’s central Palazzo d’Accursio. The idea was to save the studio’s appearance for posterity before it was dismantled.

As a result, the lens of one the twentieth century’s most important photographers penetrated under the skin of the places where the masterpieces painted by Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890-1964) were created, so as to narrate the stratification of places that had seen so much life, wear and tear and the obvious familiarity with which those rooms had been inhabited every day for many years.

So Gianni Berengo Gardin made his way into Giorgio Morandi’s intimate life, dwelling on the objects that the artist had observed and depicted so many times in his canvases. With patient modesty, the photographer recorded features of the painter’s space, such as the hat he left on the bed and the mattress that still seems to bear the impression of his body, all so as to offer a great little “trip around the room” that led to a veritable existential adventure. But above all, Berengo Gardin used his lens to capture the vases, the bottles, the plates, the coffeepots and all the other things that Morandi had arranged with skill and so tidily, before and after reproducing them in his paintings. So here in the CAMERA OSCURA we get to see the backstage of the maestro’s work and have a chance to achieve an even better understanding of the secret of his paintings.

“Gianni Berengo Gardin photographs Giorgio Morandi’s studio” also sets out to pay tribute to the art of Berengo Gardin in its internal spaciousness, conjuring the studio itself up in the visitor’s mind, the small, intimate space where the artist made his art.

Benefitting from the presence of two exceptional loans from the Morandi Museum in Bologna – Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1951, oil on canvas, and Giorgio Morandi, Natura Still Life with White Objects against a Dark Background, 1930, etching from a copper matrix – the exhibition in Perugia creates an unprecedented comparison between Berengo Gardin’s photographs, in their impeccable black and white, and Morandi’s utterly delicate colours, which transformed an obsession into pure poetry, as: the photographic record became a poetic evocation, a precise recording of an artistic practice made of restraint and contemplation.

The exhibition is being held in collaboration with the Morandi Museum in Bologna and with the Berengo Gardin Studio in Milan, with the support of L’orologio società cooperativa – Business Unit Sistema Museo.

The catalogue is published by Silvana Editoriale.

GIANNI BERENGO GARDIN

“In an essay written several years ago, Sebastião Salgado described Gianni Berengo Gardin, with whom he had been friends for a long time, as “the photographer of man”, recognising the particular empathy and the attention paid to society that have been hallmarks of the Italian photographer’s unique, unmistakable style in many years of work. As one reportage has followed another and one narrative another, Berengo Gardin’s style has become synonymous over time with everyday practice and has been fine-tuned, so to speak, to the narrative requirements necessary to every case of photographic storytelling.

Born in Santa Margherita Ligure in 1930, Gianni Berengo Gardin lived first on the Italian Riviera, then in Rome during the dark days of the Second World War and in Venice after the war. It was in the lagoon city that he became – almost simultaneously – both an adult and a photographer. While managing his family’s Venetian glass shop, he discovered the force of photography, its dense, substantial idiom and the no-nonsense black-and-white of the social investigations conducted by the great American photographers of the thirties. Curious about everything, he felt himself to be drawn to this matrix of such clear and forceful visual documentation and formed his ambition to create photography that would ask questions, investigate and show.” (Alessandra Mauro, in the exhibition catalogue)

Gianni Berengo Gardin was born in Santa Margherita Ligure in 1930. After living in Rome, Venice, Lugano and Paris, he settled in Milan in 1965 to launch his professional career as a photographer, in which he has focused on reportage, social investigations, architecture and descriptions of the environment.

While he worked with leading Italian and international publications(Il Mondo, Domus, Epoca, L’Espresso, Le Figaro, Time, Stern), his main focus has been on books: he has published more than 260 volumes of photography. His first photographs were featured in 1954 in the weekly magazine Il Mondo, edited by Mario Pannunzio, with whom he continued working until 1965. From 1966 to 1983, he worked for the Italian Touring Club, creating an extensive series of volumes about Italy and other European countries, and for the De Agostini Italian Geographical Institute, as well as numerous reportage works and corporate monographs for Italy’s leading industrial concerns (Olivetti, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, IBM, Italsider).

For more than thirty years, he created documentary records of the stages of construction of Renzo Piano’s architectural designs.

His work has been shown in more than 360 one-man exhibitions organised both in Italy and abroad.

He has taken part in Photokina in Cologne, in the Montreal Expo in 1967 and in the Milan Expo in 2015, in the Venice Biennale and in the famous exhibition “The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968” held at the New York Guggenheim Museum in 1994. With the support of the FAI, the National Trust for Italy, he showed his work in Milan in 2014, while in Venice in 2015 he showed his important reportage condemning the plague of the huge cruise ships that plied the waters of the Venice lagoon.

His 2016 exhibition “Vera fotografia. Reportage, immagini, incontri” (Real Photography. Reportage, images and encounters) in the PalaExpo in Rome illustrated his long career with his main reportages and more than 250 photographs.

In 2022, the MAXXI Museum of the Twenty-First Century in Rome organised an extensive retrospective of his work entitled “L’occhio come mestiere” (The Eye as a Craft), which was accompanied by a volume with the same title. In 2023, a new series of photographs was compiled in the exhibition and catalogue “Cose mai viste. Fotografie inedite” (Unseen Things. Unpublished Photos).

The numerous awards and recognitions he has received include the 1990 Prix Brassaï in Paris, where he was guest of honour at the Mois de la Photo, and the 1995 Leica Oskar Barnack Award at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles.

In 2008, he received the prestigious Lucie Award for his career, which had previously gone to Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein and Elliott Erwitt; in 2014, the Kapuściński Award for reportage and in 2017 the Leica Hall of Fame Award.

His images can be found in the collections of important museums and cultural foundations, including the Central Institute for Graphics at the MAXXI in Rome, the MoMA in New York, the National Library and the European House of Photography in Paris, the Elysée Museum in Lausanne and the Reina Sofía National Museum Art Centre in Madrid.

GIORGIO MORANDI

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) was one of the most important personalities on the twentieth-century Italian art scene. Born and raised in Bologna, he devoted his artistic research to the representation of simple everyday objects: a whole world of bottles, vases, bowls, cans, shells and flowers, domestic landscapes and glimpses of the Emilian countryside.

Training at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, Morandi learned about the experiments conducted by the avantgardes, in particular the Futurists and the Cubists, but he abandoned them to develop a more intimate, contemplative language of his own. His influences were Paul Cézanne, André Derain and, before them, the great masters of plasticism in painting, from Giotto to Piero della Francesca. In the course of the 1920s, he associated with the movement of Metaphysics, along with Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, despite pursuing a less intellectually-inclined path that was substantially closer to an exploration of reality.

Throughout his life, Morandi dedicated his attention to the genre of still life painting, proceeding from a long, patient observation of the objects around him. His works are the result of a meditated process of composition that investigates perspectives, equilibria, mutations of tone and dosages of chiaroscuro, resulting in the structuring of a profound visual narrative, loaded with silences and focused on the essence of each object.

CAMERA OSCURA

The project of the Camera Oscura at the National Gallery of Umbria for photography, curated by Marina Bon Valsassina and Costanza Neve, sets out to explore the essence of the art of photography, a medium that has been employed ever since its origins to capture moments and tell stories, becoming a testimonial of our reality and of human emotions. The very concept of the camera oscura, which dates back centuries before the invention of photography, stands for the idea of a place where light penetrates exclusively through a tiny hole, creating images that are projected onto a surface. This process of revelation is at the heart of photography: a dialogue between light and shadow that generates unique, personal visions.

The project offers a new perspective for interpreting reality, throwing light – even in the darkness – on the art of photography, both as a technical act and as an artistic expression, using photographs to demonstrate the continuous thread that connects the art of the past to the present.  A neon sign indicates the entrance to this ‘secret’ space, bathed in soft light and evocative shadows. There are no works here in tempera or oil, using brushes or glues, but the emphasis is on exploring concepts of time, exposition, depth and focus.

Gianni Berengo Gardin photographs Giorgio Morandi’s Studio

Perugia, National Gallery of Umbria (Corso Pietro Vannucci, 19)

23 May – 28 September 2025

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 08.30 a.m. – 7.30 p.m. (last admittance at 6.30 p.m.)

Tickets: full price €12.00; reduced price €2.00.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF UMBRIA

Perugia, Corso Pietro Vannucci, 19

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