Marino Marini was an Italian artist who initially worked mainly as a sculptor, later also as a graphic artist.
Marini studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Florence from 1917, among others with the sculptor Domenico Trentacosta. In 1928 he spent his first time in Paris. In 1929 he became a lecturer at the art school of the Villa Reale in Monza near Milan, a post he held until 1940. In the following years he travelled frequently to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Giorgio de Chirico, Wassily Kandinsky and Aristide Maillol, among others, and where he later also met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Laurens. Stays in England, Germany and Greece followed. In 1938 he met Mercedes Pedrazzini, better known as Marina Marini, and married her the same year.
In 1940 Marini moved to the Accademia di Brera in Milan; he spent the years 1941 to 1946 in Ticino, Switzerland, where he met Alberto Giacometti, Fritz Wotruba and Germaine Richier. In 1946 he returned to Milan. In 1950 he travelled to the United States for the first time on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in New York; it was held at the Buchholz Gallery, directed by Curt Valentin. Marini’s patron Valentin died in 1954 during a visit to Marini’s house in Forte dei Marmi.
Marino Marini was a participant in documenta 1 (1955), documenta II (1959), and also documenta III in 1964 in Kassel. Large retrospectives of his work were shown in Zurich in 1962 and in Rome in 1966. In 1985, the Roswitha Haftmann Modern Art Gallery, Zurich[3] showed sculptures, gouaches, drawings and prints.
Marino Marini died in Viareggio on 6 August 1980 at the age of 79.