Mountains and Bottles: The Silent Dialogue Between Giorgio Morandi and Etel Adnan

Well known within Middle Eastern diaspora circles since the 1960s for her writings and for her civic and political engagement across France, Lebanon, and the United States, Etel Adnan (Beirut 1925 – Paris 2021) was only relatively recently rediscovered and fully appreciated by Western audiences for her pictorial practice, which she began in 1959 after studying at the Sorbonne and Harvard.

Two curators played a crucial role in this reassessment: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who featured her work in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who dedicated a monographic exhibition to Adnan at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2016, titled "The Weight of the World."

On these occasions, Western audiences were able to encounter and appreciate Adnan’s most iconic paintings, which feature vibrant and essential landscapes, often in a small format, created through intense colour variations and a sort of tension between abstraction and figuration.

These works reveal a thoughtful engagement with the legacy of Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee, while locating their visual horizon in the light and contours of California’s Mill Valley, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. “Once I was asked: who is the most important person you ever met? And I remember answering: a mountain,” she would later recount.

Until 3 May 2026, a small yet carefully curated exhibition at the Museo Morandi in Bologna, conceived by the curator and writer Daniel Blanga Gubbay, explores how “in two studios far apart from one another – one on via Fondazza in Bologna, the other overlooking Mount Tamalpais beyond San Francisco Bay – Giorgio Morandi and Etel Adnan spent decades returning, with quiet insistence, to a limited number of essential motifs. Morandi arranged bottles, boxes, and vessels, shifting them by millimetres to distil form, light and interval; the Lebanese artist Adnan painted mountains, horizons and suns as interwoven planes of pure colour.”

Etel Adnan, Sans Titre, 2013, from Private Collection and Giorgio Morandi, Paesaggio, 1935-1936, Collection Museo Morandi (V. 211). Photo Credit: Barbara Cortina

Etel Adnan, Sans Titre, 2016, from Private Collection and Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta, 1956, Collection Museo Morandi (V. 985). Photo Credit: Barbara Cortina

Etel Adnan, Sans Titre, 2014, from Private Collection and Giorgio Morandi, Paesaggio, 1940, Collection Museo Morandi (V. 275). Photo Credit: Barbara Cortina

Etel Adnan, Sans Titre, 2003, from Private Collection and Giorgio Morandi, Paesaggio, 1942, Collection Zanichelli Editore S.p.A. (V. 399). Photo Credit: Barbara Cortina

Etel Adnan, Sans Titre, 2003, from Private Collection and Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta, 1958, Collection Museo Morandi (V. 1055 and 1107). Photo Credit: Barbara Cortina

It is surprising to see that there is a quiet yet persuasive resonance between the works of Giorgio Morandi and Etel Adnan. Though their artistic trajectories unfolded along different paths, both artists employed repetition and colour as means of sharpening the act of looking. Morandi did so through subtle tonal inflections and restrained, muted palettes; Adnan, by contrast, through bold chromatic relationships articulated in luminous fields of colour.

Ultimately, Etel Adnan’s assertion that “colour is an affirmation of presence” resonates with Morandi’s meditative objects and rare landscape views, revealing that for both artists, painting transcended the mere formal device and became a mode of existence.

Etel Adnan and Giorgio Morandi | Vibrations

Museo Morandi - Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 1440121 Bologna

21 January 2026 - 03 May 2026