Secondary Market
Umberto Mariani
Italian, born 1936
Umberto Mariani (born Milan, 1936) is an Italian artist known for his lead “draperies”: folded sheets of lead coated with vinyl and sand that read like heavy fabric. Trained in the fresco tradition, he has shown at the Rome Quadriennale, the State Hermitage Museum and the Gallerie d’Italia.
Biography
Umberto Mariani was born in Milan in 1936. After the Liceo Artistico he studied at the Accademia di Brera from 1954 to 1958 in the class of Achille Funi, then worked as Funi’s assistant until 1965 on large fresco decorations and on the altarpiece of Saint Joseph in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He began exhibiting in 1965.
Objects and alphabets
Mariani’s early work belongs to the climate of Italian art in the 1960s and 1970s: the Oggetti allarmanti (1967–1974), the Alfabeto afono (1974–1980) and a series of theatrical installations in the 1980s. In 1973 he took part in Dissuasione Manifesta, the poster project commissioned by the critic Enrico Crispolti.
The hidden form
Since the early 1990s Mariani has worked mainly with lead. He folds the heavy metal sheet into pleats that recall the drapery of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting, then coats it with vinyl paint and sand so that the surface reads as cloth. The series is called La forma celata, “the hidden form”: what the folds appear to cover is left to the viewer. Shown in dialogue with Byzantine and Russian icons in Frammenti da Bisanzio, these works travelled from the Museo Nazionale di Ravenna to Rome and to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (2018–2019), and were presented at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan in 2020.
Recognition
Mariani took part in the XIII and XIV Rome Quadriennale (1998–1999 and 2003–2004). Retrospectives followed at the Chiostri di San Domenico in Reggio Emilia (2013) and at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (2016), the year Skira published his monograph. In 2024 he was included in POP/BEAT – Italia 1960–1979 at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, and in 2026 Il Vittoriale degli Italiani at Gardone Riviera devoted Piegare il piombo, costruire la luce to his work. MA*GA, the Gallarate museum of art, holds one of his folded lead works.