One of the most important and innovative painters of his generation, Joseph Marioni (1943–2024) developed his groundbreaking, sensuous, and sensitive work over a more than fifty-year career.

To look at a painting by Joseph Marioni is to engage with what he called a “portrait of color”: each painting’s size, shape, and particular application of paint (Marioni used a paint roller, with which he controlled the paint’s fluid cascade down the surface of the linen support) are calibrated to present a single color from multiple, differently hued painted layers. The final product is what Marioni called “liquid light,” his term conveying the exquisite tension between the liquid bodies of his paintings and the weightless light they emanate to the viewer.

Beginning with subtle experiments in line and color in 1970, Marioni’s practice evolved in the years that followed into a profound investigation of painting’s most fundamental properties: paint, color, materiality, and light. This presentation, the first in New York since 2006, focuses on the second half of Marioni’s career, during which his painting most profoundly synthesized the fluid materiality of his painted surfaces with the immateriality of light and color. Marioni moved to New York in 1972 and was a leading member of the Radical Painting Group during the ‘70s and ‘80s along with artists such as Marcia Hafif, Olivier Mosset, and Günter Umberg. Marioni also maintained dialogues with Clyfford Still, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman.

Light was the very heart of Marioni’s project, as well as the whole history of painting as he saw it. As he put it: “What is miraculous about the art of painting is its unique emotional engagement with light. Light is at the very core of its being… So when the sun of the day visits the body of the painting on the threshold of the wall, the painting is pregnant with light and we are witness to the life in its being. Its subject is the gravity of its light.”