Marcello Jori was born in Merano in 1951. In the early 1970s, he completed a course in classical studies at the Faculty of Art History in Bologna, where he also met Renato Barilli, who would curate his first ever exhibition at Galleria de’ Foscherari in 1977. Ever since his early beginnings as an artist, he has pursued a project of ‘total art’, making him a preeminent figure in the world of contemporary eclecticism.
At the beginning of the 1980s, following a period dedicated to painting with words – a recurring theme throughout his career – he embarked on paintings of crystals and precious gems, geometrical beacons of energy and light through which he would attempt to repaint the world. Confident in his style, this period marked the genesis of some of Jori’s most important series of works: Giacimenti, Foreste and Città. Another seminal, ambitious project in his career was Città meravigliosa, for which he portrayed the most significant artists in the world, neatly encased in houses to fit their bodies.
While embarking on these career-defining endeavours, Jori also founded The New Italian Comic and launched fruitful collaborations with publishers. He had work published in Italy for Linus, Alter and Frigidaire and in France for Albin Michel in L’Écho des Savanes. He also collaborated with Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines. Between 1992 and 1998, he drew exclusively for the Japanese publishing house Kōdansha.
In 1996 he published The Marvellous City of Extraordinary Artists (texts by Stefano Benni and Alessandro Mendini), which was accompanied by an exhibition in Siena. This work envisioned a conceptual and pictorial construction of a city home to some highly celebrated denizens: artists destined for immortality. In the 2000s he published Nonna Picassa and branched out into new areas of creativity that enabled him to understand other levels of artistic communication such as rock and mass music. This experience culminated in him creating the set design for Vasco Rossi’s concert Rock under siege at the San Siro stadium in Milan: a painted city of 20 metres by 70 metres.
In cementing his international reputation, Jori has participated in three Venice Biennales, the Paris Biennale and two Rome Quadrienniales. He has had his work exhibited in galleries and museums in Italy and abroad, including the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, Studio Morra, Galleria Trisorio and Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples, Studio Marconi in Milan, Galleria de’ Foscherari and the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna, the Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Trento, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Frankfurt Art Association and the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York. In the 1990s he participated in the exhibition Psycho, curated by Christian Leigh, Adrian Dannatt and Donald Kuspit, as well as another important exhibition in New York with Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt and James Croak. He also had his own solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Boston. In 2000 he held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna curated by Danilo Eccher, which reproduced some of his photography from the 1970s. In 2010 he exhibited at the Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin and relaunched his collaboration with the Marconi Foundation in Milan, which hosted a solo show for him in January 2011 entitled Gli Albi dell’Avventura. In 2015 he held a major personal exhibition at the Marconi Foundation entitled Le Grand Jour à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte, featuring a catalogue edited by Bruno Corà and a book published by Skira.
Jori lives and works between Bologna and Milan.
