Joseph Marioni at the Phillips Collection
Nov. 12, 2011 - Jan. 29, 2012
Paul Rodgers/9W is pleased to announce the fall program of artist Joseph Marioni and to invite you, by private appointment, to visit its current installation of recent paintings displayed under natural light in the gallery's private viewing room.
• On October 22nd, 2011, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will open an exhibition, Joseph Marioni at the Phillips, of fourteen small to medium format paintings designed to fit with the residential scale of Duncan Phillips' famed collection of modern art. The exhibition will be installed on the second floor of the museum in proximity to the permanent collection. Marioni's purpose will be to demonstrate that the liberation of color, that has been explored in the great tradition of modern art, is still a force in art today.
• Just published by Yale University Press, is a new volume by the important critic and art historian, Michael Fried, entitled Four Honest Outlaws - Anri Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Marioni, Douglas Gordon. Fried makes the case that painting, in the hands of Marioni, continues to hold our attention in the company of sculpture, photography and new media.
• On December 10th, again at the Phillips Collection, and chaired by Michael Fried, a symposium entitled Painting Now: A Discussion Taking off from the Work of Joseph Marioni will be held with the following participants: Harry Cooper, curator, National Gallery; John Elderfied, curator emeritus, the Museum of Modern Art; Karen Wilkin, independent curator and art critic.
It is now clear that Joseph Marioni is a major protagonist in the stakes of post-war American art. The painter dates the beginning of his career to 1970, so that it now spans four decades. His first New York exhibition at Artists Space in 1975 was selected and presented by Brice Marden. Confronted by an ubiquitous hostility to painting in the New York avant-garde of the 1970's and beyond, Marioni set out to explore the aesthetic tenets of Minimalism, centering around the status of the object in real space, and to engage it with the European 'Concrete' movement of Fontana, Manzoni and Klein. Marioni's purpose was to explore the expansive properties of color and uphold the relevance of painting in contemporary art.
Joseph Marioni has exhibited his work widely across America and Europe, and his paintings are to be found in numerous museum collection from the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Fine Art Houston, San Francisco MoMA and the Fogg Art Museum to the Basel Kunstmuseum, Switzerland, the Kolumba Museum, Cologne and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. His work has been given individual survey exhibitions in America and Europe from The Secession in Vienna to the Rose Art Museum in Boston. Paintings have been included in major group exhibitions such as “Claude Monet- Modernism to Digital Expressionism” at the Foundation Beyeler and “Monochromes - From Malevich to the Present” at the Renia Sofia.
Today Marioni is the major practitioner of color and light in contemporary painting. He now is embarked on a fresh phase of work, with a new series of large format/institutional scale paintings, which bring his handling of the expansive properties of color into an encounter with natural light. In these works we will see the innovations of Monet's late paintings and Matisse's Fauve period given new form in the twenty first century.
This new focus on light is being previewed in our current presentation at the gallery. Please contact us at 212 414 9810 to make an appointment.
Paul Rodgers
