Joseph Marioni, Yellow Painting, 2000, Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher, 96 x 78 in., Collection of the Artist.

SAN ANTONIO, TX.- The McNay surveys the last two decades of the four decade career of Joseph Marioni, a New York-based painter who explores color and light in minimalist abstract paintings of often heroic proportions. Organized by the McNay, ARTMATTERS 13: Joseph Marioni: Liquid Light opens October 22, 2008 and extends to January 18, 2009.

The exhibition features 18 lush, nearly monochromatic and light-filled paintings, drawn primarily from the artist’s personal collection and installed according to his design. The works range from canvases hardly larger than a tabloid paper to others that nearly extend from floor to ceiling. All are characterized by a deliberate layering of liquid acrylic applied onto stretched linen. Using a commercial paint roller, the artists covers the canvas with skins of color, in which bits of painting under are visible beneath an overall monochromatic surface.

“Yellows, whites, blue-violets, orange-reds, and greens, these are colors of works in the exhibition as described to me by Joseph. “This artist undoubtedly sees color as form and as a metaphor for the human spirit.” remarks René Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945 at the McNay and the organizer of Joseph Marioni: Liquid Light.

Joseph Marioni: Liquid Light is the 13th offering of the ARTMATTERS series, which the McNay has developed to showcase the work of living artists. Recent ARTMATTERS exhibitions focused on the installation work of Ernesto Pujol, ceramics by Lynda Benglis, and photographs by Jane Hammond.

Born in 1943 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Joseph Marioni studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and San Francisco Art Institute prior to moving to New York in 1972. Since the early 1970s, Marioni’s work has been presented in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. Three large scale paintings in variations of yellow presented in 2007 at Wade Wilson Art in Houston, Texas, are included in the McNay exhibition. Marioni’s paintings are found in public and private collections around the world, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Joseph Marioni, Yellow Painting, 2006, Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher, 30 x 32 in., Collection of the Artist