ROME. Carlo Maria Mariani, an internationally renowned painter for innovative figuration, exponent of the Anachronistic current and Cultured Painting, died in Rome at the age of 90. Born in Rome on 25 July 1931, he has lived between the capital and New York since 1993. With a figurative language he reworked, through a practice of conceptual matrix, neoclassical stylistic features and iconographic citations from ancient art alongside surreal or metaphysical suggestions (“Hercules resting”, 1976; “Monument to poetry”, 1994-95; “Judgment universal “, 1996;” Mal du siècle “, 1998-99). After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Mariani first worked in the habit of mural painting and at the end of the 1960s he began to exhibit his easel works.
The figurative beginnings of Mariani are linked to the hyper-realistic manner, subsequently surpassed around the mid-1970s when he exhibited a series of copies, by works by classical and neo-classical artists such as Mengs, David or Hayez and Appiani understood in a highly conceptual key. . The imitative process was aimed at the complex formation of his poetics of a cultured nature. In the Eighties the Roman artist was one of the reference points of the so definitive Cultured Painting, theorized by the critic Italo Mussa, in open antithesis with the Transavantgarde.
Mariani’s intense artistic activity is testified by a series of exhibitions: the most significant was that of 1975 at the Cannaviello Gallery in Rome and some personal exhibitions in New York at the Sperone Gallery. Mariani’s works have been presented in important periodic reviews (Biennale di San Paolo, 1981; Documenta di Kassel, 1982; Biennale di Sydney, 1986; Biennale di Venezia, 1982, 1984, 1990; Quadriennale di Roma, 1992), as well as in thematic exhibitions and in various personal exhibitions. He has had important commissions in the United States (“Il Giorno e La Notte”, 1989-90, Millennium Hotel in New York; three large paintings for the Bellagio Complex in Las Vegas, 1998).
Mariani has exhibited in the most important museums from the MoMA in New York to the Center Pompidou in Paris, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Winner of the Marche Prize for Contemporary Art in Ancona (1997), in 1998 he obtained the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei for painting.