The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.

Morandi at Mattia De Luca
2024.10.22
Don’t miss the meditative but expansive Morandi exhibition now showing at Mattia De Luca’s pop-up gallery space on the upper east side. With about 60 pieces, this is a huge, museum-quality exhibition, spanning Morandi’s entire artistic career, from his 1913 Cubist paintings to the last painting he made, still on his easel when he died in 1964. Paintings, drawings and prints, hung mostly chronologically, give a clear story of Morandi’s development from an interest in Cubist space to a fascination with the spatial twists of positive/negative shape ambiguities, from a love of quiet color to a confident control of color as subtle contemplative light. Beginning with relatively straight-forward still-lifes of bottles in tableaux arrangements, along with gentle landscape paintings, we watch Morandi as he begins to discover the simultaneity of overlapping curves, and later the merging of object with shadow and background, as the sides of bottles slowly slide into the background or another bottle behind. Some drawings and prints are so sparse that they almost are pure abstractions of shape, but all have a delicacy of air and light, a lightness and gentleness of touch. The last two paintings he made are intriguing, as they feel unfinished, though they are signed. Perhaps Morandi, who had lung cancer and probably knew he was dying, wanted to control his art post-mortem, perhaps his eyes or energy were failing him -- or did he have something different to say, something about the fleetingness of life? Curated by Marilena Pasquali, the founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center, Bologna, the exhibition remains on view through Nov. 26. The gallery, which is based in Rome, requests that you make a reservation at https://www.mattiadeluca.com/mostre/giorgio-morandi-time-suspended-part-ii/ before visiting.