Mary Ellen Bartley: Morandi's Books

The Drawing Room is pleased to present an exhibition of Mary Ellen Bartley’s Morandi’s Books, altered photographs that she begun executing at her residency at Giorgio Morandi’s library in Bologna.

At Casa Morandi, Bartley’s initial compositions were quiet still lifes of stacked volumes of art and philosophy books with titles such as Nature Morte and Piero della Francesca. On her second visit, after the pandemic, Bartley was allowed to work in Morandi’s original painting studio with the objects he memorialized. Setting up still lifes on his worktable scrawled with contour lines of his positioned objects, Bartley had a revelatory experience taking her technique in new directions.

Upon her return home, during a residency at The Church in Sag Harbor, she made the radical departure to explore the art of trompe l’oeil over her original photographs. Positioning sheets of vellum, glassine and colored paper on top of her earlier still lifes in a collage; she made a new photograph. Each adaptation of an earlier still life represents two periods of time. With titles such as Ingres Collage, Celluloid Blue Striped Vase and Oil Can Glassine, Bartley offers clues to the interventions. Temporality and composition have long intrigued Bartley; she has photographed collections of books for decades, each with an original point of view reflecting the owners. 

 See below for full press release and selected works.