Marino Marini * –

(Pistoia 1901–1980 Viareggio)
Composizione, 1956 (conceived and executed), stamped on the base MM, bronze (one out of 5 casts), 41 x 22.5 x 24 cm
This work is registered under number 158 with the Fondazione Marino Marini, and is accompanied by a photo-certificate, issued by Dott.ssa Maria Teresa Tosi, Pistoia, 13 November 2003.

Provenance:
Collection Drs. A. M. Mees, Netherlands (probably acquired in the 1950s)
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in 1980)
Private Collection, Switzerland

Exhibited:
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Nederlanders verzamelen Hedendaagse Kunst, February – April 1962, no. 73

Created in the mid-1950s, Guerriero gives form to the deep crisis Marini saw at the heart of the post-war world, and of modernity itself. His sculptures from these years are charged with a restless energy, as if poised on the edge of catastrophe. Over the course of the decade, the bond between rider and horse grew ever more fragile in his work: the rider loses his hold and seems about to fall. The forms changed in step with this. The smooth, compact volumes of Marini's earlier sculpture gave way to sharp edges and thrusting angles. In Guerriero, the interlocking planes suggest an underlying geometry, almost the logic of a machine.
For Marini, horse and rider stood for humanity's relationship with nature and with the world at large. He chose to show the breakdown of this ancient partnership in a formal language that itself recalls industrialisation, the very force behind its undoing. The artist described his equestrian figures as an expression of the turmoil of his century. He saw them as marking the end of a myth: the heroic, triumphant individual of the Humanist tradition. His late work, he insisted, was meant to be "not heroic, but tragic" (quoted in Fondazione Marino Marini, ed., op. cit., p. 14).
Yet against all odds the warrior stays mounted, carried by a horse whose rigid, almost pyramidal legs hold firm. In this survival lies something close to a miracle. Marini himself suggested that the rider's fall could become a kind of apotheosis: the beginning of a new era, from which humanity might emerge transformed. Even amid his own existential unease, Marini thus offers an image of hope.
Specialist: Joëlle Romba