Inaugurating the Estorick Collection’s fifteenth-anniversary year, Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry brings together a large selection of graphic works by Bologna’s master of poetic understatement. Entirely self-taught as a printmaker, Morandi began to produce etchings in 1912. He quickly mastered the technique, coming to consider it an important vehicle for artistic expression, and went on to hold the Chair in Printmaking at Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts for over twenty years. Restricted only in terms of their subject matter, these still lifes and landscapes in fact reveal the artist’s stylistic versatility and desire for experimentation.

Also included are a number of Morandi’s watercolours – works that exemplify his ability to distil the essence of a complex scene or composition into an arrangement of near-abstract forms. Captivating in their restraint and extraordinary economy of means, these images are nevertheless intensely evocative of time and place.