A joint commission will identify the works to be exhibited and the place of exhibition in the terminal, part of a program of exhibition initiatives for passengers arriving or departing from Milan Malpensa airport.
The first of these initiatives, promoted by the Municipality of Milan and SEA, is the Idea of the Knight, created in 1955 by Marino Marini (1901-1980), one of the best known and most appreciated sculptures by the Tuscan master kept at the Museo del Novecento in Milan , which will welcome passengers who from 15 May to 31 August 2014 will pass through Porta di Milano, the exhibition space between the Terminal entrance and the railway station.
This consolidates the project studied by SEA to propose the airport, a crossroads of emotions linked to the travel experience, as the ideal place to give voice to artistic expressions in their infinite forms.
In this direction, the intention to promote La Porta di Milano as a unicum in the panorama of world airports is strengthened, as it is designed as a functional structure for accessing the airport and as an exhibition space capable of enriching the already important cultural offer of Milan, welcoming art initiatives on a regular basis.
“The experience of contamination between contemporary art and the city's public spaces, which began with the exhibition of Melotti's Sette Savi, continues with another work characterized by a strong iconic power – declared the councilor for culture Filippo Del Corno -. An experiment that has had great success also due to the strong symbolic value of the exhibition, which welcomes passengers from all over the world with the most beautiful face of the city, offering the opportunity to discover an extraordinary city as soon as you disembark from the plane of art and culture. The work will remain on display throughout the summer, "meeting" even passengers in transit and thus inviting them, discreetly and indirectly, to stay in Milan to discover it better. An invitation that will be renewed in the coming months, and therefore also during the semester of Expo 2015, with new works and various artists from the precious civic art collections”.
“This agreement is a very important step forward in SEA's cultural policy, traditionally aimed at enhancing the cultural heritage of Milan - says Pietro Modiano, President of SEA - It is a collaboration with the most important contemporary art museum in the Italy that makes us legitimately proud. The entire airport is no longer just a necessary passage for those departing or arriving, but becomes an exciting place, an aspect that SEA has been promoting for years with numerous initiatives ranging from art to music to sport. Different forms of entertainment to meet the expectations of an extremely heterogeneous audience”.
The work
Created by Marino Marini in 1955, the sculpture Idea del Cavaliere is part of a complex of five works dedicated to the same subject, including a polychrome plaster version conserved in the Vatican Museums. The representation of the horse/rider combination interprets a constant interest in Marini's production. Starting from the first elaboration in 1935, the artist returned to the theme several times, giving life, over the years, to a tight sequence of sculptures and paintings. Born as an anti-rhetorical investigation into the vitality of the millenary monumental tradition of the figure on horseback, the series imposes itself in the context of the history of twentieth-century Italian sculpture as a structural reasoning on the forms of sculpture. In the progressive succession of variations, Marini explores the combination of bodies betraying a visual culture capable of feeding on multiple referents from time to time, from the recovery of classical and primitive formulas, to the recovery of the rounded profiles of the Chinese horses in the Musée Guimet, up to look with interest at the excited battles of Delacroix or the dramatic twists of Rodin. In this context Idea del Cavaliere embodies a significant research phase. Interpreted by the critics mostly in an existential key, insisting on the hypothesis of a hardening of the composition following the tragic experience of the war, the work is placed within a close dialogue with the contemporary world.
As Marino Marini himself underlined in 1958 "When one considers my equestrian statues of the last twelve years one after the other, one observes every time that the rider is unable to tame the horse and that the beast, in its increasingly wild anguish, it becomes stiffer, instead of rearing up. I truly believe that we are heading towards the end of a world”.
The simplification of the masses into edges, triangles and oblique trajectories, together with the vigorous convergence of the figures, where they identify the indisputable reference to Picasso, reopen the dialogue with the lesson of Arturo Martini. New suggestions are grafted onto these assumptions: such as the fascination for the energetic volumes of the British sculptor Henry Moore, evident in the tension introduced by the rotation of the head on the knight's body.
The Porta di Milano is an architectural work that represents the "twelfth gate" of access to the city, created by the architects Pierluigi Nicolin, Sonia Calzoni - who also signed the installation of the exhibition - Giuseppe Marinoni, Giuliana Di Gregorio, winners of the competition international, promoted by SEA Aeroporti di Milano in June 2009, with a project selected from over 90 from all over the world.
Marino Marini. Biography:
Marino Marini was born in Pistoia on February 27, 1901. At the age of sixteen he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, dedicating himself initially to drawing and painting; he approaches sculpture only starting from 1922.
In 1929 he moved to Milan, called by Arturo Martini to occupy the chair of sculpture at the art school of Villa Reale in Monza. The first important sculpture by him, Popolo, in terracotta, dates back to the same year, with which Marino reveals himself to the public and critics.
In 1931 he created Ersilia, a sculpture in polychrome wood considered one of the fundamental works and in 1932 he presented his first personal exhibition in Milan.
His work begins to obtain the first important recognitions with the participation in the Quadrennial of Rome; at the II Quadrennial in 1935 he won the first prize for sculpture.
Cavaliere appeared in 1936, a work of considerable significance also for the subsequent evolution of research, of which Marino created two versions, one in bronze and one in wood, now in the Vatican.
In 1938 he met Mercedes Pedrazzini, whom he married a few months later and whom he affectionately called "Marina" to underline the bond that would unite both for life.
In 1943 Marino took refuge in the Canton of Ticino together with Marina: these were particularly important years of exile for the artist. In Switzerland, in fact, he met and frequented some great masters of contemporary art – Giacometti, Wotruba, Otto Bänninger, Haller, Germaine Richier – whose work contributes to the deepening of his themes and his research.
In this period the cycle of the Pomones continued, female figures symbolizing fertility, a theme already started in 1935. The series of Miracles also took shape with the Archangel, works that spring from the anguish, from pain, from the destruction that war and the violence they cause to humanity and of which Marino deeply feels the weight.
The year following his return to Italy (1947) was decisive for him: he participated in the XXIV Venice Biennale with a personal room and, on the occasion, formed a deep friendship with Henry Moore; in the same period he meets the American merchant Curt Valentin, who invites him to the United States and organizes a large one-man show for him in New York and a series of exhibitions which contribute to making his work known throughout the world.
Marino's art is by now in the highest consideration: in 1952 he obtains the International Sculpture Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, in 1954 the International Grand Prix of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, in 1959 he executes the large equestrian composition, well tall five meters, intended for a square in The Hague.
Numerous exhibitions followed - in Munich, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki - culminating with the great anthologies at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in 1962 and in Palazzo Venezia in Rome in 1966.
In 1968 he received the highest German honor in Göttingen with his appointment as a member of the Orden pour le Mérite fur Wissenschaften und Kunst.
In 1972, the day after the exhibition set up at the Piero della Francesca Study Center, Marino donated a complex of 29 sculptures and 10 drawings to the Municipality of Milan, including the plaster casts of the most famous portraits made between 1928 and 1967. This first nucleus it will later be enriched by his wife Marina who, through an act of loan transformed into a donation in 1984, binds to the Civic Art Collections of Milan about two hundred works by the artist, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, lithographs and etchings. The works, which mark the birth of the Marino Marini Museum in Milan, find a first location as early as 1973 at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Via Palestro, perfected in 1983 with the staging by Studio Albini Helg Piva. In 1976 the New Art Gallery of Munich dedicated a permanent room to Marino and in June 1979 the Documentation Center of Marino Marini's work was inaugurated in the halls of the Palazzo Comunale in Pistoia, which collects, in addition to the drawings and engravings, the large sculpture Miracle and other works of smaller format, a specialized library, a photo library and a video library documenting the life and works of the artist. Marino died in Viareggio on August 6, 1980.
Since 2010, the Marino Marini Collection has found a new arrangement at the Museo del Novecento in two suggestive rooms designed by Italo Rota and Fabio Fornasari.
