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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Fondazione Marino Marini under number 172.
Executed in the mid-1950s, Guerriero explores the dark and fundamental crisis that Marini felt characterised the post-war, and indeed the modern, era. Marini's sculptures harness the frenetic energy of an imminent existential apocalypse. Increasingly during the 1950s, the riders had been depicted in an increasingly degraded relationship with their steeds, losing control and on the brink of falling. Echoing this transformation, or even degradation, this same period saw the smooth, pared-back roundness with which Marini had modelled his earlier sculptures give way to a jutting angularity. In this way, the various planes and forms in Guerriero hint at a barely submerged language of geometry, or even machinery.
For Marini, the time-honoured relationship between the horse and rider symbolised man's relationship to the world as a whole, and to nature. Marini has deliberately chosen to portray this crisis, with the rider losing control and tumbling from his horse, with a visual language that speaks of the very industrialisation that encompasses the doom of that ancient symbiosis. As the artist himself stated, 'My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. The restlessness of my horse grows with each new work, the rider appears increasingly worn out, he has lost his dominance over the beast and the catastrophes to which he succumbs are similar to those which destroyed Sodom and Pompeii. I hope to make the last stage of the dissolution of a myth - the myth of heroic and victorious individualism, of the Humanists' virtuous man - visible. My work from these last years is not intended to be heroic, but tragic' (Marini, quoted in Fondazione Marino Marini (ed.), op. cit., p. 14). Yet the fact that the rider remains mounted, against the odds, on a horse whose legs have a rigid and almost pyramidal stability tells of our own miraculous survival. Marini explained that the fall of the rider could in itself become an apotheosis, the dawn of a new age, Man rising from the ashes of his relationship with the horse to evolve into something new. Thus, in the midst of his own existential angst, Marini provides us with an image of hope.
Executed in the mid-1950s, Guerriero explores the dark and fundamental crisis that Marini felt characterised the post-war, and indeed the modern, era. Marini's sculptures harness the frenetic energy of an imminent existential apocalypse. Increasingly during the 1950s, the riders had been depicted in an increasingly degraded relationship with their steeds, losing control and on the brink of falling. Echoing this transformation, or even degradation, this same period saw the smooth, pared-back roundness with which Marini had modelled his earlier sculptures give way to a jutting angularity. In this way, the various planes and forms in Guerriero hint at a barely submerged language of geometry, or even machinery.
For Marini, the time-honoured relationship between the horse and rider symbolised man's relationship to the world as a whole, and to nature. Marini has deliberately chosen to portray this crisis, with the rider losing control and tumbling from his horse, with a visual language that speaks of the very industrialisation that encompasses the doom of that ancient symbiosis. As the artist himself stated, 'My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. The restlessness of my horse grows with each new work, the rider appears increasingly worn out, he has lost his dominance over the beast and the catastrophes to which he succumbs are similar to those which destroyed Sodom and Pompeii. I hope to make the last stage of the dissolution of a myth - the myth of heroic and victorious individualism, of the Humanists' virtuous man - visible. My work from these last years is not intended to be heroic, but tragic' (Marini, quoted in Fondazione Marino Marini (ed.), op. cit., p. 14). Yet the fact that the rider remains mounted, against the odds, on a horse whose legs have a rigid and almost pyramidal stability tells of our own miraculous survival. Marini explained that the fall of the rider could in itself become an apotheosis, the dawn of a new age, Man rising from the ashes of his relationship with the horse to evolve into something new. Thus, in the midst of his own existential angst, Marini provides us with an image of hope.