Marino Marini: From Color to Form

New to the Olla Art collection is a lithograph from Marino Marini’s portfolio ‘From Color to Form’ from 1969. ‘From Color to Form’ is undoubtedly one of Marino’s most beautiful and famous portfolios. In an explanation to the portfolio, the sculptor Marino says that he ‘always felt the need to paint’, and that he never embarked on a sculpture ‘without having first pictorially explored its essence’.
According to Catherine Vassaux, curator of a Marino exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (2013), ‘Marino’s dedication to a progression from two-dimensional to three-dimensional art is also deeply based in his commitment to colour. Marini understood form as a unique manipulation of colour, as an embodiment of the energy of colour.’

Horses and riders
The portfolio ‘From Color to Form’ consists of ten lithographs that address the well-known Marino themes: mainly horses and riders in different dynamic colour spectra. ‘These works combine all of Marini’s elements of inspiration: the primitive rendering of human and animal bodies, the celebration of colour and its ability to structure form and communicate the movement of life, and the nonrepresentational shapes of abstract art’ (Vassaux, 2013).