MILAN.- Palazzo Citterio in Milan is presenting the first major posthumous retrospective devoted to Carlo Maria Mariani, bringing together 70 works that trace more than seven decades of an artist who made the history of painting itself one of the central subjects of his work.

Titled The Eternity of Painting, the exhibition runs from October 9, 2026 through January 10, 2027 and is curated by Eike Schmidt and Clayton Calvert. Spanning Mariani’s production from the 1940s to 2019, the show follows an unusually wide-ranging career that moved through Neoclassicism, Hyperrealism, abstraction, Conceptual art and Metaphysical painting without ever abandoning a deep engagement with art history.

Mariani, who was born in 1931 and died in 2021, developed a practice grounded in sustained study of philosophy, literature and theory. His work repeatedly returned to questions of memory, beauty, artistic identity and the relationship between past and present. Rather than treating historical styles as fixed periods, he approached them as living languages that could be reactivated and reconsidered in contemporary art.

The exhibition’s setting is particularly significant. Palazzo Citterio forms part of the Brera complex, whose collections chart centuries of European painting. For Angelo Crespi, Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Palazzo Citterio and the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, presenting Mariani there is also a way of asserting the continued relevance of painting within contemporary art.

Mariani’s own description of himself captures the complexity of that position. He famously said, "I am not a painter, I am not the artist, I am the work." He also preferred to describe himself as "a conceptual artist who paints, not a conceptual painter," a distinction that points to the central tension in his practice: ideas and images were never separate, but neither was painting merely a vehicle for theory.

The exhibition begins with works from Mariani’s youth in Rome. Growing up in a culturally engaged family, he was surrounded by the city’s artistic heritage and had opportunities to study works by Raphael, Michelangelo and other masters firsthand. His Composizione of 1949 was painted soon after a teenage visit to Venice, where he encountered Tintoretto and the great painters of the Venetian Renaissance.

By the 1960s, his work had taken on a more anxious and critical tone in response to the social transformations of the period. Paintings such as L’era dei miracoli (1965) incorporate symbols of modern life while maintaining a strong sense of tension and unease.

During the 1970s, Mariani’s style became increasingly virtuosic, especially in his treatment of the human figure. At the same time, he expanded his practice beyond the canvas, presenting paintings in connection with performances and happenings. His study of Goethe, Winckelmann and the artists associated with Neoclassicism became increasingly important, leading him into dialogue with figures such as Anton Raphael Mengs, Antonio Canova, Ingres, Jacques-Louis David and Angelica Kauffmann.

The 1980s marked another major phase in his development. Mariani refined a highly personal visual language filled with allegory and dense art-historical references. Among the key works from this period is Constellation of Leo (1980–81), one of his best-known paintings. Toward the end of the decade, he began developing the motif of monumental heads and busts, which would remain central to his work for more than thirty years.

His move to New York in 1993 introduced a new element into that classical vocabulary. Works from the period began to explore displacement and the question of whether an artistic identity could be transferred from one cultural setting to another. Non Trasferibile (1993) addresses that issue directly, while later paintings would place classically inspired figures against the New York skyline.

The tone of his work also darkened during the 1990s in paintings such as Cariaticido II and Cariaticido III (both 1996) and Twins (1997). After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mariani responded with The Morning, part of a body of work in which beauty is paired with a lingering sense of anxiety and disquiet.

His final works became increasingly introspective. A Flight of Doves (2012–16), one of the culminating works in the exhibition, brings together many of the concerns that had occupied him throughout his career while also reflecting his critical view of the contemporary art world.

For co-curator Clayton Calvert, Mariani remains difficult to place within a single category because his work deliberately crossed boundaries between Conceptual art, Neoclassicism, Pop, Metaphysical painting and, later, Surrealism. Eike Schmidt similarly emphasizes that Mariani’s return to classical language was never nostalgic. Instead, he treated the classical tradition as an active visual grammar through which modern and conceptual questions could be reconsidered.

By bringing together paintings and large-scale cartoons from major Italian and international collections, The Eternity of Painting presents Mariani not as an artist looking backward, but as one who saw the past, present and future as a continuum. The retrospective argues that his work belongs precisely in that unsettled space between historical memory and contemporary thought, where painting becomes both subject and method.