Maria Morganti. Generare l'Archivio

The project represents a first attempt to give theoretical and exhibition form to the theme of the archive, a practical and conceptual cornerstone of fundamental importance in the artist's research. For over two decades, Morganti's painting has taken shape in terms of a daily practice, repeated but never monotonous, which crystallizes within the canvas, through the power of color, the passage of time outside of it. A painterly practice that reveals an explicitly processual attitude, in which every gesture, mark, and chromatic passage assumes the function of bearing witness to an intimate correspondence between artist and work, establishing a spatiotemporal habit, exploring its infinite variations.

Condensing, sedimenting, collecting are keywords of an approach to painting as a form of archiving: operating modes that do not limit themselves to the perimeter of the canvas but, in recent years, have translated into a broader conceptual project. Officially established in 2023 with the founding of the archive committee, the Maria Morganti Archive collects the entirety of the artist's work, its context, the connections arising from it, and represents the culmination of a process carried out personally over the past fifteen years and still ongoing. In its physical (the Studio) and digital (www.mariamorganti.it) headquarters, the Archive represents not only a cataloging device but a generative institution: an artwork itself, a self-portrait in progress whose physiognomy can change countless times, just like the order of cards in a freshly shuffled deck.

Through a selection of painting, installation, and documentary works - some created for the occasion – Generare l’archivio aims to highlight a series of key elements of Morganti's research and the concept of archive she has developed, where the works in their singularity cohabit an ideal space in which everything is interconnected and interdependent. The archival vocation of the artist, materialized in the act of painting, becomes the common denominator that regulates her world, her language, her way of living: painting as archive, archive as artwork.