View of the NO HEROES installation at Forte Belvedere
Until October 16, the Drama: Four Acts exhibition project expands with a new chapter, the No Heroes exhibition, dedicated to one of the undisputed protagonists of the twentieth century: Marino Marini.
Promoted by the City of Florence and organized by the Mus.e Foundation, with the scientific coordination of the Museo Novecento and curated by Sergio Risaliti, Drama: Four Acts inaugurated Belvedere Firenze’s cultural summer with a journey that intertwines contemporary art, historical heritage, and landscape.2
Marina, a tribute to Marino Marini by Beatrice Brandini
The project unfolds over the summer season like a four-act drama, bringing together artists and languages from different eras.
The cornerstone of Marino Marini’s research is the celebrated theme of the horse and its rider, approached by the artist as a metaphor for the human condition and the relationship between the individual, nature, and history.
View of the NO HEROES installation at Forte Belvedere
“The juxtaposition with Paolo Canevari offers a surprisingly contemporary reading of Marino Marini’s work,” says Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento. “The exhibition is dominated by a dramatic design that emphasizes contrast and even an inversion of content. The subjects undergo a twist of meaning, so that the Bather becomes a woman in mourning, a woman at the foot of Calvary, a figure prostrated before the ineffable and pain, reinforcing the contrast between vitality and pessimism, irony and nihilism, creative energy and destructive forces, power and innocence. While Canevari confronts the viewer with the contradictions and violence of the present through industrial materials transformed into disturbing images, Marini recounts the very fragility of man through the timeless strength of sculpture and the archetypal figures of the Horse and Rider and those of the Dancer and the Prisoner. The dialogue between the two artists thus transcends chronological distance and highlights a continuity of questions about the destiny of being.” human, on conflict and dehumanization…4
View of the NO HEROES installation at Forte Belvedere
Following the opening of Paolo Canevari’s solo exhibition, God Year, the second act features one of the greatest masters of twentieth-century sculpture. With No Heroes, a selection of five bronze sculptures by Marino Marini enters into dialogue with Canevari’s works, creating an installation of strong emotional and conceptual intensity.
View of the NO HEROES installation at Forte Belvedere
While the figures in the works of the 1930s retain a monumental balance and classical restraint, the experience of the Second World War, that of extermination and nuclear apocalypse, profoundly transformed this language. The bodies stiffen, the forms become angular, the horse rears up until it unseats its rider, as in the Miracles series. The loss of balance thus becomes an image of the crisis of modern man, overwhelmed by a violence he can no longer control. Horse and rider ultimately embody a critique of the new technological and industrial society, oppressive, dehumanizing, and responsible for social conflict.
“Humans have discovered something bigger than themselves, something they can no longer control, something that becomes dangerous for humanity. The artist feels all this a hundred times more than others, and so it becomes tragic, absolutely tragic. This is why my sculptures are selected forms, architectures of an enormous tragedy. The knights and the horse, in my latest works, have become strange fossils, symbols of a vanished world, or rather, of a world that I believe is destined to disappear forever.” Marino Marini
Good life everyone
Beatrice