"Until now I have never been attracted to the monochrome, which inevitably has struck me, in the many instances of it I have come across over the years, as artistically inert, or to use the language of 'Art and Objecthood,' as merely and depressingly literal... So it was a shock when I visited 'Joseph Marioni: Paintings 1970–1987, A Survey,' organized by Carl Betz at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and realized after a few minutes in their midst that the artist’s monochromes were paintings in the fullest and most exalted sense of the word. How could that be? How could a type of work that I considered simply a vehicle for a hackneyed theoretical / ideological stance, a stance that at its freshest I regarded as mistaken, have been made to yield paintings of beauty and power?"
- Michael Fried, Artforum (September 1998)
Photo curtesy of Estate of Joseph Marioni.
One of the most important and innovative painters of his generation, Joseph Marioni developed his groundbreaking, sensuous, and sensitive work over a more than fifty year career. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1943, Marioni studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating in 1972 to New York City, where he would live and work for the rest of his life, leaving his indelible mark on twentieth and twenty-first century painting along the way.
Marioni’s painting followed a trajectory of progressive development: beginning in 1970 with brightly colored dichromatic works before growing more richly in material with the breakthrough dark paintings of 1974, two of which would be selected by Marioni’s colleague Brice Marden for a one-man show at Artists Space in 1975. In the years that followed, Marioni began to reintroduce a strong color identity and push the opacity of his paint toward a more nuanced translucence. Often associated with monochrome, Marioni’s acrylic-on-linen paintings reveal multiple layers of different hues, all contributing to a singular color image in what he often referred to as “portraits of color.”
Blue
2022
Acrylic + linen on stretcher
28 x 22 inches
71 x 56 cm
Marioni was a leading member of the Radical Painting Group of the 1970s and ’80s along with artists Marcia Hafif, Olivier Mosset, and Günter Umberg, among others. He also maintained dialogues with Marden and Robert Ryman, as well as with a number of German colleagues working in the radical tradition such as Umberg, Peter Tollens, and Ingo Meller. Marioni showed extensively throughout the United States and Europe, including major shows at the Phillips Collection (2011), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2016), and Museum Wiesbaden (2018). More than one hundred of his paintings are held by museums around the world, including the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In 1998, art critic and historian Michael Fried encountered Marioni’s painting at a survey exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, curated by Carl Belz. Fried would write in his review for Artforum, “I consider Marioni to be one of the foremost painters at work anywhere at the present, and the great and thought-provoking surprise his art has given me is not only that it transcends the previous limitations of the monochrome but also that it is the first body of work I have seen that suggests that the Minimalist intervention may have had productive consequences for painting of the highest ambition.” Fried would maintain communication and friendship with Marioni until Marioni’s death in 2024.
