Ostension

The fundamental body of Maria Morganti’s painting is composed of various types of works that use colour as a tool for recording the temporality of her life experience. For at least thirty years, works such as Sedimentary, the Diary-theque, the Infinite Painting, the Bowl, etc, grow daily in number and/or proportion thanks to the serial repetition of different painterly gestures. Over the years the artist has reserved a portion of her studio where she performs these gestures and which is called the Gestureplace: it consists of a raised platform around which her painted works are stashed in large wooden and metal structures called archivers. While the primary function of the platform is for painting, the second are the works-archive in which the works are simultaneously generated and conserved.
In the knowledge that this space is a ‘dense custodian’ of Morganti’s artistic production, the intention of the Ostension* project is that of taking the Gestureplace from the private space where it took shape over time and, transporting it into an exhibition context, allowing it to relate with a public able to observe it and walk through it for the first time.
Far from being a simple act of delocalisation, the Ostension project contemplates the execution of a performative moment in which two performers come into contact with the archivers of the Gestureplace and, in two distinct moments, empty them of the works they hold to then neatly recompose them. In this way, Morganti’s paintings leave the compressed and dense spaces of the archivers to migrate towards the surfaces of the museum walls and sediment in a new and temporary spatial-temporal configuration.
The Ostension – which thus becomes synonymous with mise-en-scène – corresponds to the act of activating Morganti’s archive and, opening a reflection on the idea of exhibiting, allows it to gather in a wider space all the time the artist’s painting is made of (and in which it is made).
*Ostension is the exhibition project of Morganti’s painting as it happens and succeeds over time. This is why not one Ostension, but many Ostensions exist – can exist – which are consequential forms of the same idea of exhibition which, depending on the place, the people involved and the year in which they take place, will have different forms and developments.

Ostensions
 These are works that consist of an exhibitive part and a performative one through which the Gestureplace and all the painted material contained inside it is brought out in front of the viewer’s eyes.
It is a means of de-locating and exhibiting the private space of the studio and the archive elsewhere. The mise-en-scène changes according to the place, the people and the context. There are infinite variations and each ostension is titled with a progressive number.

Exhibition
Esposizioni che assumono lo statuto di opera

Performance
Opere derivate dal movimento o dall’azione di corpi nello spazio e nel tempo