Marino di Teana: Sculptures

 

Marino di Teana, who gained widespread recognition in the 1960s and worked well throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, is known for his monumental public commissions and as one of the forerunners of architectural sculpture.  A trained engineer and architect, di Teana envisioned sculpture and architecture as one. He employed the use of industrial materials like steel, viewed his sculptures as complete structures (sound in scale and structural balance), and pioneered a theory of form, called "tri-unity," wherein a sculptor’s arrangement of negative space played as important a role as his arrangement of physical mass. 

 

While Marino di Teana’s versatility and immense scale impress, it is his purity of design that ultimately commands our attention. No piece is a mere architectural model. Regardless of whether his pieces fit in the palm of your hand or, instead, rise to the height of city blocks, they are at once fully conceived sculptures and beautifully composed structures, not a single one of which could be wrought without di Teana’s singularly deft understanding of space.

 

Marino di Teana’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Tome, Japan, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Paris, the George Pompidou Center, the National Contemporary Art Museum, Korea, and The New Contemporary Art Museum MAC/VAL. It is also held in a number of private collections, including those of L’Oreal and Francois Pinault. 

 

This survey of the Marino di Teana's works, mounted in honor of the release of his most recent monograph & catalogue raisonné, will be running at