Gino Marotta

Gino Marotta was born in Campobasso on June 20, 1935.

At the age of fifteen he moved to Rome, where he came into contact with the artists who animated the Roman scene, from De Chirico to Capogrossi and Turcato.

He based his long artistic career on the exploration of new languages and the constant experimentation with new techniques and innovative materials, sharing his research with the many avant-garde movements that followed one another from the 1950s onward.

In the 1950s he developed a series of highly diversified subjects, styles and techniques: encaustics, polymaterial collages, and sand amalgams. His solo exhibition at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan marked his debut in June 1957, presenting tapestries, encaustics and velatini.

At the end of the decade a new line of research began. In 1959 he presented in Rome at the Galleria Appunto and in Milan at the Galleria dell’Ariete Piombi, Allumini e Bandoni, iron sheets removed from Roman shantytowns that Marotta assembled, often leaving visible the stratifications of images pasted over the years. With the Bandoni, he initiated a period of research inspired by the recovery of found objects and by what can be re-proposed as an aesthetic entity.

In the early 1960s, in the laboratories of chemical industries, factories and foundries, he experimented with new materials such as polyurethanes and polyesters, creating sculptures by using industrial procedures for mass production.

In 1960, together with Pietro Cascella, Piero Dorazio, Fabio Mauri, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Mimmo Rotella and Giulio Turcato, he founded Gruppo CRACK, a transversal movement aimed at promoting a new conception of freedom of expression outside rigid schemata.

A friend of poets such as Ungaretti and Cardarelli, he created artist’s books with Antonio Delfini, Giorgio Soavi and Emilio Villa.

His vocation for the use of unprecedented materials continued with methacrylate sculptures, an artificial, highly technological material, in total antithesis with subjects drawn from the natural world. With this cycle of works he developed a research aimed at grasping the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial. The methacrylate sheets, bidimensional and transparent, are arranged in orthogonal sections that confer three-dimensionality on the sculptures and allow light to pass through rapidly.

For Marotta, methacrylate became a privileged medium. He described it as “the only material that does not degenerate, because it is highly technological.” Transparency, until then the prerogative of noble materials such as glass, was transferred to this new artificial material. Methacrylate itself almost necessarily generates the introduction of light: “I used light-color instead of matter-color,” Gino Marotta would say. In those years he introduced neon light into the works exhibited in the show Naturale-Artificiale at the Galleria dell’Ariete of Beatrice Monti in Milan.

Between 1967 and 1970 he created large-scale environmental works such as Bosco Naturale-Artificiale, Nuovo Paradiso, Eden Artificiale in methacrylate and Misura Naturale Cava in fiberglass.

In 1968, in Rome, during the exhibition Teatro delle Mostre at the Galleria La Tartaruga of Plinio De Martiis, he presented Foresta di menta, a multisensory environmental work whose elements simultaneously stimulate the five senses.

In the same year, at the event Arte Povera più Azioni Povere organized by Germano Celant in Amalfi, he participated with Giardino all’italiana, an urban intervention consisting of hay bales. The work, included in the Azioni Povere section, was originally intended to catch fire, transforming into a black line on the asphalt. The transition from three-dimensionality to line did not occur for safety reasons.

In 1969 he took part in the exhibition 4 artistes italiens plus que nature at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris, together with Ceroli, Kounellis and Pascali.

Gino Marotta participated in and contributed to the conception of some of the most significant exhibitions of contemporary Italian art: Lo Spazio dell’Immagine in Foligno (1967), Amore mio in Montepulciano (1970), and Vitalità del negativo at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (1970–71). Pierre Restany wrote on this occasion: “I am convinced that the cultural climate of Rome after the 1960s would have been far bleaker without the great thematic inventions of Gino Marotta.”

With the exhibition Amore mio, Marotta made public a research begun at the end of the 1960s, in which industrial enamels with acidic and violent colors on galvanized or oxidized metal sheets and on methacrylate panels reproduce his loves from art history—from Perugino to Titian, from Cranach to Ingres and Hayez—or magazine images of pin-ups. In the methacrylate boxes, the figures reveal materials of different nature, from cardboard to feathers, from silver paper to popular fabrics. All this reveals, on the one hand, Marotta’s love for painting and, on the other, a vein of irony that constantly accompanies his research.

In 1971 he participated in the exhibitions Elf Italiener Heute at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund and Multiples: The First Decade at the Museum of Modern Art in Philadelphia, and in 1972 in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at MoMA in New York.

He also devoted himself to cinema and avant-garde theater. Of particular interest is his collaboration with Carmelo Bene. In 1972 he created the sets and methacrylate costume-sculptures for the film Salomè and the stage design for Nostra Signora dei Turchi, and in 1987 the sets and costumes for Hommelette for Hamlet, which earned him the UBU Award for Best Stage Design in 1988.

In 1977, at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, he exhibited the Rilievi, anamorphic and virtual images emerging from wooden structures.

In the 1980s he also turned to more traditional materials such as marble, bronze and oil painting, continuing his research on language and on the study of the incidence of light in pictorial works.

From the late 1990s onward he created new works in methacrylate.

Artificial light, which had characterized Marotta’s work in the 1960s, returns in the works of the early third millennium. Here the light is LED, as in the works Ricognizione virtuale della savana (2009) and Cronotopo virtuale, an environmental work from 2011.

The artist writes: “Digital programs, lasers, LEDs and colored filters make it possible to trace, according to the principle of optical fibers, images that are perhaps hallucinatory, nourished by a luminous temperature never painterly, but more significantly optical-spectral (derived from the decomposition of the light spectrum), as Balla would have liked for his Compenetrazioni iridescenti, had he possessed the means that I can use today. Artistic adventure is not a trade or a profession, but rather a way of being, bound to the destiny of language that allows us to tell facts and stories that are different each time.”

In his 2009 solo exhibition at MACRO in Rome he presented Eden artificiale, a selection of methacrylate sculptures, and Ricognizione virtuale della savana, a ten-meter-long installation using lasers and LEDs. “The great work Ricognizione virtuale della savana is a blade of lights and colors in a dark room. A large panel in which the artist carries out a reconnaissance of his own work, arranging on a plane that is both imaginary and physical the virtual ‘icons’ of an artistic research that becomes hypertext,” writes Luca Massimo Barbero, curator of the exhibition, in the presentation text.

In 2011, at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion, he exhibited Cronotopo virtuale, an environmental work of colored light in which images appear in all their virtuality and immateriality. Here, as Marotta states: “Colored light, optical color, instead of material color, assumes a physical dimension.”

“Works with light are linked to an idea of modernity that the artist understands as a free progression of life…,” writes Laura Cherubini, curator of the exhibition Luci d’artificio in Venice in 2011.

On 6 October 2012, at the GNAM – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the exhibition Gino Marotta. Relazioni Pericolose opened, curated by Laura Cherubini and Angelandreina Rorro. “…a true and fruitful intellectual relationship that produced a ‘non-exhibition exhibition,’ a path that naturally unfolds by following the one already traced by Marotta. A dangerously vibrant relationship among people with different roles and a common goal: to verify the vitality of the museum space and its collections by rereading them through the eyes and work of one of the protagonists of the artistic scene of the second half of the twentieth century and of contemporaneity. For about a year, notes, meetings and discussions followed one another among Gino Marotta, Isa Francavilla Marotta, Laura Cherubini, Angelandreina Rorro and the superintendent Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, who shared the idea of the project and enabled its realization,” the curators write.

On 16 November 2012 Gino Marotta died in Rome.

On 9 February 2013, at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the study day For Gino Marotta took place. Speakers included Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Maurizio Calvesi, Laura Cherubini and Bruno Corà. Among the many testimonies were Lorenzo Canova, Barbara Martusciello and Raffaele Gavarro. On that occasion the book by Gino and Isa Marotta Letters. Correspondences of Art and Life, Maretti Editore, was published.

Numerous writers and art critics have engaged with his work and artistic thought, including: Bruno Alfieri, Vito Apuleo, Alberto Arbasino, Flavio Arensi, Iolena Baldini (Berenice), Paola Ballesi, Guido Ballo, Luca Massimo Barbero, Renato Barilli, Giorgio Battistelli, Andrea Bellini, Fabio Belloni, Fortunato Bellonzi, Carmine Benincasa, Ilaria Bernardi, Achille Bonito Oliva, Giuliano Briganti, Palma Bucarelli, Rossana Buono, Maurizio Calvesi, Lorenzo Canova, Luciano Caramel, Luigi Carluccio, Flavio Caroli, Toti Carpentieri, Cesare Casati, Germano Celant, Laura Cherubini, Bruno Corà, Claudio Crescentini, Enrico Crispolti, Fabrizio D’Amico, Guido Davico Bonino, Mario de Candia, Jole de Sanna, Gillo Dorfles, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Flavio Fergonzi, Alberto Fiz, Raffaele Gavarro, Maurizio Grande, Emilia Granzotto, Walter Guadagnini, John Hart, R. C. Kennedy, Giorgio Kaisserlian, Udo Kultermann, Gian Piero Jacobelli, Renzo Marchelli, Giuseppe Marchiori, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Gianluca Marziani, Ada Masoero, Giulia Massari, Lea Mattarella, Filiberto Menna, Dario Micacchi, Federica Pirani, Giancarlo Politi, Elena Pontiggia, Paolo Portoghesi, Domenico Porzio, Ludovico Pratesi, Franco Purini, Franco Quadri, Emilio Radius, Pierre Restany, Angelandreina Rorro, Antonello Rubini, Franco Russoli, Adriana Sartogo, Edoardo Sassi, Giuseppe Sciortino, Vittorio Sgarbi, Franco Simongini, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Rodolfo Siviero, Giorgio Soavi, Tommaso Trini, Alessandra Troncone, Lorenza Trucchi, Marco Valsecchi, Lionello Venturi, Lara Vinca Masini, Emilio Villa, Maurizio Vitta, Cesare Vivaldi, and many others.