Carlo Maria Mariani. Arte oltre il tempo
At Pitti Palace the exhibition dedicated to the contemporary Italian painter
"Carlo Maria Mariani. Arte beyond time" is the title of the exhibition hosted in the Andito degli Angiolini in Palazzo Pitti untill the 1st of December 2024.
The exhibition consists of sixteen works by the Italian painter and internationally recognized contemporary master, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 90 in New York, and is curated by Clayton Calvert, executive director of The Carlo Maria Mariani and Carol Lane Mariani Foundation of New York and the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi.
The exhibition covers a time span of over 50 years of the artist's production from 1968 to 2019 and includes contributions from the Foundation that bears his name, from the MART of Trento and Rovereto, from the Achille Forti Modern Art Gallery Collection of Verona, from Museo del Novecento in Milan and from the Antonio Martino Collection in Rome.
“It is integral and implacable, positioning itself between Canova and Winkelmann, the return in Carlo Maria Mariani, the nostos: it is no longer a return to order, it is the recomposition of a lost world, an anastylosis in painting – states Vittorio Sgarbi. Mariani goes beyond David and concedes nothing to the present. His neoclassicism is reconstructed in the light of Surrealism, in a continuous projection of the dream [...]. His neoclassicism is not ideological, it is sentimental, it is Italy seen by a traveler who comes from afar, in his case who goes away to see it again".
“It is an exhibition born out of the continuity of Art History and of beautiful and intelligent Painting, that strongly relates to the masterpieces from the past present at Palazzo Pitti, establishing a powerful dialogue in the name of immortality and above all of the eternal contemporaneity of sublime ageless, and aesthetically and philologically intellectual painting - this is Clayton Calvert's comment regarding "Art beyond time" - Therefore Palazzo Pitti and Florence represent for Carlo Maria Mariani his ideal Constellation of Leo, where he can mediumistically rejoin his Masters who accompanied him throughout his life, from Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, Gentileschi... to his beloved neo-classicism with Canova, Mengs and Kauffmann".
BIOGRAPHY
Carlo Maria Mariani (Rome, 25 July 1931 – New York, 20 November 2021) at the age of 18 was invited to the Third Annual Art Club Exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome; in the early 1950s he participated in various collective exhibitions taking place in Rome, such as the Youth Art Exhibition, the Youth Meetings and the Lazio Art Exhibition and obtained a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1955; in 1958 and 1959 he moved to Copenhagen where he participated in the International Kunstnernes Exhibition at the Den Frie Gallery; he received important commissions for sacred works: mosaics, frescoes and works on canvas. He has exhibited in the best Italian and international private galleries and in the most prestigious institutional venues in the world: Documenta, Kassel; Biennale di San Paolo; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden Washington, D.C. ; Museo Rufino Tamayo Mexico City; National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo; Hirshorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mathildenhohe Darmstadt; Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Frankfurt Kunstverein; GNAM Roma; Palazzo delle Esposizioni Roma; Palais des Beaux Art, Charleroi; Biennale di Venezia; California Center for the Arts; Frye Museum, Seattle; Ostende Museum of Modern Art; Quadriennale di Roma; Art Center Moscow and Leningrad; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museo di Palazzo Te, Mantova; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington: Temple University Rome.
He lived in New York from 1993 until the year of his death. Among the various awards received during his career, there is that of the Accademia dei Lincei which awarded him the Feltrinelli Prize for Painting in 1998, for his mentally incorruptible idea of beauty.
