MARCELLO MARIANI, THE TIME OF THE ANGEL, 1956-2014

With a reportage by Gianni Berengo Gardin

curated by Gabriele Simongini

The exhibition, promoted by the Abruzzo Region and curated by the art historian and essayist Gabriele Simongini, will last until November 4th and will cover almost 60 years of Mariani's career, a long time during which the artist has imposed itself in the international arena for the constant reflection on informal painting, then evolved in a language free from any pre-established definition. His training had been influenced, in some respects, by the example and work of artists such as Licini, Fontana, Burri, Beuys and Rauschenberg that led him to develop an increasingly poetic, intense and anarchic vision of the world. 

The evocative and very dynamic display of the exhibition includes the large canvases by Mariani that cover decades of work: in fact, even if the exhibition focuses particularly on the works of the 2000s, it has an initial nucleus, germinal and precious, in seven artworks expanses between 1956 and 1960 witnessing the very early revelation with which Mariani identified his field of investigation.

To accompany the artist's large canvases, Gianni Berengo Gardin's photographs will also be on display with a special reportage on his long-time friend Marcello Mariani: 20 shots taken before the earthquake by the great master of photography, which gives us an insight into Mariani's intimate and powerful life.

"The time of the angel" arrives in a particularly lively period of the Complesso del Vittoriano, it is in fact one of the three launch exhibitions of the autumn exhibition season and will live on October 3rd with the great tribute to Andy Warhol on the 90th anniversary of his birth and from October 10th with one of the most precious segments of the Whitney Museum in New York: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and many other representatives of the New York School. More significant, given Mariani's constant reflection on the heritage and relevance of American abstract expressionism, is the presence at the Vittoriano of his own exhibition and of the one dedicated to Pollock and the School of New York, in a distance dialogue that will open the way to many reflections focused on works based exclusively on intensity and inner authenticity. 

The exhibition catalog, created by Skira Editore, will present texts by the curator, journalist Danilo Maestosi and some of the artist's writings, as well as images of the works exhibited at the Vittoriano and those recently presented in the homage that was dedicated to Mariani by the  Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

Works

Vernissage