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‘In the right place’: how Italian painter Giorgio Morandi’s home influenced Hong Kong gallery director to switch to art when she was young

Patricia Crockett is a director of David Zwirner gallery in Hong Kong. When a student in Italy, seeing Morandi’s home inspired her switch from literature to art

She bonded with her grandmother over the artist’s still-life paintings, and now deals with Morandi works in Hong Kong, something she says ‘closes the loop’

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Italian painter Giorgio Morandi in his flat in Bologna, in 1958. Visiting the artist’s then former home in the early 2000s would greatly influence the life and career of Hong Kong art gallery director Patricia Crockett. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 5:15pm, 15 Feb 2023

Casa Morandi, the former home of Giorgio Morandi in the Italian city of Bologna, recreates how the house was when the artist lived there, from 1933 to 1964, complete with the vases, bottles, bowls and other materials that inspired the meticulous still-life paintings for which he is best known.

Patricia Crockett, senior director of contemporary art gallery David Zwirner, in Hong Kong, tells the Post how it changed her life.

In 2002, when I was 22, I did an Erasmus (European Union student exchange programme) for a year in Bologna. I’m from Hamburg, Germany, and I was studying at Humboldt University, in Berlin.

I hadn’t travelled much in Europe. I’m half Portuguese, and any holiday we had, we spent it there with family.

Patricia Crockett, senior director of contemporary art gallery David Zwirner in Hong Kong. Photo: David Zwirner

I was two years into my studies when I went to Bologna, and it was my first time being away from home alone. I’d always been terribly homesick. I was very nervous about it but really wanted to see Italy. And it was the University of Bologna, which is the oldest in Europe.