Joseph Marioni is internationally regarded as one of the leading figures of Radical Painting, an art movement wholly dedicated to the exploration of color. In September 2024, he passed away at the age of 81. To honor his legacy, the Von der Heydt Museum—home to one of Marioni's characteristic works—will pay tribute to the painter with a special exhibition.
Born in 1943 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Marioni lived and worked in New York. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe, and is part of several major private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Kolumba Cologne, the Goetz Collection in Munich, and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
Marioni’s work is rooted in the American Radical Painting movement, which emerged in the 1970s as a response to the ideas of artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis, leading to new forms of expression through color. Over five decades, Marioni developed a distinct, increasingly refined approach. For him, color was not merely a part of the process but a living essence. Layering translucent shades over one another, he applied paint evenly but not homogeneously, using a paint roller rather than brushes. The edges of his canvases reveal the runs of still-wet paint, as well as the successive layers of color. Nothing in his work was left to chance; Marioni meticulously planned each piece, aiming to give color the quality of a vibrant, transparent skin and to imbue his paintings with a corporeal presence that could be sensed physically, not just visually.
With the kind support of the Hengesbach Gallery, Wuppertal.