From May 25 to June 25, 2022, Galleria Gracis in Milan (Piazza Castello 16) will host the exhibition Alphatype2022, featuring twenty artworks by Lorenzo Marini that document the last ten years of the Milanese artist’s activity.

The exhibition at Galleria Gracis gathers works that reveal Marini’s artistic roots and his original way of approaching the creative moment. Marini, in fact, works horizontally contaminating painting, serigraphy, environmental installation and photography, in a universe that ranges from graphics to industrial design, from advertising languages to cartoons, up to the experimentation of the Historical Avant-garde.

In his works, figuration, uniqueness or duplication of figures, abstraction, richness of color or essentiality of the line, coexist on the same level. Hence the creation of a new visual context that frees language bringing to light perceptive and psychic experiences realized in sign, verbal or graphic experiences.

“In this solo exhibition I randomly recombine the artworks of the individual letters, like a visual where there is nothing to read but only to look at. This creates alphabetical combinations where typographic diversity is an absolute value. And the individuality of our society is widely told. I look, therefore I am.” comments Lorenzo Marini.

The gallery in Piazza Castello will also host the Raintype installation: 1200 letters reproduced on clear material hunging up on wires falling from the ceiling, in a colourful effect.

For this work, Lorenzo Marini has designed hundreds of original types that swinging randomly into the void, reveal combinations that are not always as immediate as logic would suggest.

On the occasion of the Salone del Mobile, from 7 to 12 June, the exhibition will also involve the Certosa Initiative space (via Barnaba Oriani 27) with the Mirrortype installation, a mirrored steel room where seven letters, also in mirrored steel, have been suspended in a space that will thus appear dimensionless. Lorenzo Marini has imagined an immersive place where the visitor can be part of the artwork itself, in a dialogue among letters, lights, observer and music, thanks to the musical accompaniment of Mariella Nava.

Lorenzo Marini is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan, Italy, Los Angeles and New York. Marini attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where he was mentored by Emilio Vedova. After obtaining his degree in architecture, he spent the next thirty years building  a successful career in advertising.

In 2016 Marini had an artistic epiphany thatled him to celebrate the beauty of letters. In 2017, fresh from this success, he published his manifesto for the liberation of Type, in so doing becoming the founder of a new art form: that of devoting an artwork to each individual letter of the alphabet, liberating letters from their duty of function in order to celebrate their pure intrinsic beauty.

In Visual, his first phase, Marini’s paintings can be read as the translation of advertising campaigns into contemporary art, with a rigorous logic of spaces and equilibria. But in this second artistic phase, they can also be read as a revolutionary interpretation of the pop beauty of the contemporary alphabet. In 2021 his exhibition “Di Segni e di Sogni” was awarded by AVI association as the most viewed of the year.