From 23 July to 14 November 2021 the exhibition "I cavalieri di Marino Marini" will be hosted at the Nervi Gallery of Modern Art, curated by the Marino Marini Foundation, Pistoia.

On the occasion of the reopening of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Genova Nervi with a rearrangement that proposes an unprecedented reinterpretation of its collections, the museum presents, in the exhibition spaces intended for the new museographic project for temporary exhibitions, a large anthology of the Tuscan artist Marino Marini (Pistoia 1901 - Viareggio 1980), one of the most important and significant Italian sculptors of the twentieth century.

The exhibition, focused on the main archetype of his plastic research, that cycle of Horses and Knights which gave rise to the San Giorgio and the Dragon, created in 1930-31 and preserved at the Civic Museums of Monza, collects not only sculptures dedicated to this fundamental theme of his long and articulated artistic experience, but also works on paper and paintings. The dialogue between sculpture and drawing - framed here in a broad chronological span, at the extremes of which are placed the chalk San Giacomo at the turn of 1939 and the tempera on canvas paper Composition of 1966 - attests to the linguistic autonomy of the different forms of expression in art by Marini, but also their coherent stylistic and cultural integration.

Equally complex is the inspiring motif of these works which, coming for the most part from the collections of the Marino Marini Foundation in Pistoia, but also from some important private collections, reveal the coexistence in the Tuscan artist's work of archaism and modernity. In both sculptures, graphics and paintings, Marini managed to combine references to the tradition of classical sculpture with a personal confrontation with the avant-garde tensions of his time.

With a creative freedom that allowed him, without repetitions or moments of fatigue, to experiment and replicate this subject until the seventies, Marini therefore gradually disrupted the figurative contours of his horses and riders to give greater evidence to the distribution of the plastic masses.