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拍品专文
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Fondazione Marino Marini.
‘If you really want to find the sources of my present style in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii have fascinated me far more than the Laocoön group in the Vatican’ (Marino Marini, interview with Edouard Roditi, 1958, pp. 85-90, in E. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1990, p. 88).
Executed in 1959, Guerriero expresses Marino Marini’s ultimate, drastic take on the subject of the horse and rider. The artist had started exploring the subject in the 1930s, after having been deeply impressed by the equestrian statue of Henry II at the Bamberg Cathedral in Germany. Marini’s early riders displayed the grace and poise of classical statuary, yet the subject would evolve throughout the years, acquiring more troubled, dramatic tones to reflect the psychological aftermaths and trauma of the Second World War.
In Guerriero, forms have assumed tragic aspects. A horse is crouching on its front legs, its neck and head stretched backwards, while the elongated figure of the rider on its back is thrust backwards into a dramatic fall. Both the animal and human figure appear fused into a dark magma, like charred remains of organic matter. The tense forms seem to be the traces of a last, desperate gesture of escape from a fatal end. In the context of the Post-War years, Guerriero poignantly echoes the most traumatic experiences of the conflict, resonating with the horrors of concentration camps and Hiroshima’s destruction. ‘If the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age’, Marini confessed, ‘I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine’ (Marino Marini, interview with Edouard Roditi, 1958, pp. 85-90, in op. cit., p. 88).
Yet, by resorting to a classical subject like the horse and rider, Marini’s works from this period such as Guerriero also appear as statement on the condition of art in the flux of the contemporary world. Leaning towards abstraction and dominated by destruction and corrosion, works such as Guerriero are the symbols of a lucid, yet perhaps melancholic farewell to the art of the past. In their tormented forms, they convey the impossibility of figurative art to comment on the complexity and absurdity of the contemporary world in the same way it had done in earlier centuries. Marini himself explained: ‘The horseman and the horse, in my latest works, have become strange fossils, symbols of a vanished world or rather of a work which I feel, is destined to vanish forever’ (Ibid., p. 88).
‘If you really want to find the sources of my present style in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii have fascinated me far more than the Laocoön group in the Vatican’ (Marino Marini, interview with Edouard Roditi, 1958, pp. 85-90, in E. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1990, p. 88).
Executed in 1959, Guerriero expresses Marino Marini’s ultimate, drastic take on the subject of the horse and rider. The artist had started exploring the subject in the 1930s, after having been deeply impressed by the equestrian statue of Henry II at the Bamberg Cathedral in Germany. Marini’s early riders displayed the grace and poise of classical statuary, yet the subject would evolve throughout the years, acquiring more troubled, dramatic tones to reflect the psychological aftermaths and trauma of the Second World War.
In Guerriero, forms have assumed tragic aspects. A horse is crouching on its front legs, its neck and head stretched backwards, while the elongated figure of the rider on its back is thrust backwards into a dramatic fall. Both the animal and human figure appear fused into a dark magma, like charred remains of organic matter. The tense forms seem to be the traces of a last, desperate gesture of escape from a fatal end. In the context of the Post-War years, Guerriero poignantly echoes the most traumatic experiences of the conflict, resonating with the horrors of concentration camps and Hiroshima’s destruction. ‘If the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age’, Marini confessed, ‘I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine’ (Marino Marini, interview with Edouard Roditi, 1958, pp. 85-90, in op. cit., p. 88).
Yet, by resorting to a classical subject like the horse and rider, Marini’s works from this period such as Guerriero also appear as statement on the condition of art in the flux of the contemporary world. Leaning towards abstraction and dominated by destruction and corrosion, works such as Guerriero are the symbols of a lucid, yet perhaps melancholic farewell to the art of the past. In their tormented forms, they convey the impossibility of figurative art to comment on the complexity and absurdity of the contemporary world in the same way it had done in earlier centuries. Marini himself explained: ‘The horseman and the horse, in my latest works, have become strange fossils, symbols of a vanished world or rather of a work which I feel, is destined to vanish forever’ (Ibid., p. 88).