Marino Marini

Marini gained international renown in the 1950s with three major exhibitions of his work in Amsterdam, Brussels, and New York. He has had exhibitions in almost every major city in the world and prizes, medals and awards constantly accorded him. Selected collections include the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Marino Marini Museum, Florence; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; National gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Trento, Italy; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; San Diego Museum of Art, California; Tate Gallery, London et al.

In 1928 Marini traveled to Paris where he made his début as a sculptor, and studied with Picasso and other leading modern artists. He also was a close associate of Henry Moore. Marini was strongly influenced by the suffering he witnessed in Italy during the war and his work expresses emotion through color, form and with a plasticity that in its polychromatic range and its archaic simplicity of shape goes back through the centuries to very early Chinese figurines and Etruscan or Greco-Roman sculpture. In 1950, at about the time he was gaining worldwide prominence, he described his work, as part of a "new renaissance of sculpture in Italy, the new humanist, the new reality."  

Marini was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and the Feltrinelli Prize at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 1954. His working life covered more than 60 years of prodigious and prolific activity. Though Marini died in 1980, his works - sculpture, painting and graphics - live on, a continuing testament to a "Master" artist .