Marino Marini is the greatest Italian sculptor of the 20th century and his work very much embodies the joys and sorrows of that momentous period in European history. An accomplished and prolific painter and printmaker as well as sculptor, Marini produced
over 300 etchings and lithographs. This graphic work was perhaps as important to him as his sculpture, particularly in the use of colour as inspiration, as he eloquently describes:

“We as artists and men, always need some positive pole in order to develop an idea. The positive pole, for me, is colour. A yellow, a green, a red. One morning, perhaps when I am quiet, without any impulse to create anything, it is enough for a colour to get into me and stimulate me…..a colour insists, a colour becomes yours and, in this colour you discover a
certain image. There starts what one may define the feeling for art.”

This feeling for colour was often used economically and contrasted with an allencompassing cement grey. Adapting his great themes to the media of print Marini celebrated grey through a range of beautifully subtle tones. Drypoint, aquatint and lithographic processes are well suited to textural and tonal effects and he used them all to great advantage. Marini describes his creative aims as trying to fuse the inherent human aspiration for happiness with the drama and brutality of History weighing down on Man. All his work relates powerfully to history, classical images, forms that not only burst with an irrepressible life force but are simultaneously constrained within a skin stretched and bound, eroded and fragmented.

Unlike his near contemporaries the Futurists, Marino Marini did not adopt the use of mechanical forms inspired by industry and mass production to be of ‘the modern time’. He looked back in particular to the Etruscans for their primitive, joyful, poetic sense of life, bringing to his fecund forms and dynamic conjunctions a sense of conflict and suspense, a contemporary, ominous expression of man’s potential for self-destruction.

Rungwe Kingdon