A Giorgio Morandi still life asks for very little: a few bottles, a box, a jug, pushed together on a tabletop and painted in chalky whites, ochres and greys until the objects seem to lean on one another for warmth. The painter of Bologna’s Via Fondazza spent decades on that same handful of things, and the paradox his admirers keep returning to is that such narrow means have never looked dated. A new exhibition at Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in Paris, titled Un lieu de l’infini (A place of the infinite), sets out to test that claim by hanging him beside artists who went much further toward abstraction.

The method is the dialogue. Rather than a survey, the gallery, founded in Bologna by Franco and Roberta Calarota and now with a second home on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, builds the show around a handful of Morandi still lifes, each paired with one later artist: Ettore Spalletti, Lee Ufan, Josef Albers and Lucio Fontana. Most of these pairings revive encounters the gallery has staged before, now gathered under one roof.

A small Morandi still life in a gilded frame beside a pale canvas of scattered brushstrokes — Image: Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m.

The Spalletti dialogue goes back to the gallery’s historic Bologna rooms, where the Italian artist repainted the walls a delicate cream so that his works and Morandi’s shared one suspended atmosphere; the critic Francesco Bonami called it a “duet between two sopranos.” A 1941 still life from the collection of the art historian Francesco Arcangeli, a friend of the painter, meets Lee Ufan’s spaced, deliberate brushstrokes, a pairing first shown at The Armory Show in New York. With Albers the link is seriality: the Homage to the Square returns to its single motif as stubbornly as Morandi returned to his bottles, and in both, colour decides where a form begins and ends.

The closing dialogue is about light. Morandi makes it almost tangible on the canvas; Fontana lets it in physically, through the slits of his Cuts. In the announcement, the gallery sets Morandi’s ambition “to tighten the meshes of pictorial language until the invisible becomes a phenomenon” against Fontana’s gesture as a passage toward the infinite. Homages to Morandi by Arman, Bertozzi & Casoni, César and Dadamaino complete the hang.

The intellectual anchor is older. The Hôtel de Ville de Paris staged a Morandi monograph in 1987 with the City of Bologna, and its introductory essay by Franco Solmi described a “Morandi condition”: a painter who stays different while remaining faithful to himself, and in doing so resists the conformisms of his age. The gallery frames this show as a return to that still-open question, nearly forty years on.

Un lieu de l’infini runs from 6 October to 5 November 2026 at 208 Boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. It coincides with the publication of Giorgio Morandi. Mark Rothko, a volume from Fondazione Calarota and Dario Cimorelli Editore built around Franco Calarota’s pairing of the two painters, with contributions from scholars and institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Christopher Rothko of the Rothko Foundation.

For a painter who seldom left Bologna, the infinite was always a matter of a few centimetres between a bottle and its shadow. Paris now gets to measure them.

Tags: Ettore Spalletti, Galleria d'Arte Maggiore, Giorgio Morandi, Josef Albers, Lee Ufan, Lucio Fontana