Architect Peter Marino Announces Launch of Eponymous Foundation in Southampton

Peter Marino's lifelong passion for the arts has spawned a new foundation to exhibit his collection out East.

During the opening reception for Counterpoint: Selections From the Peter Marino Collection at the Southampton Arts Center, renowned architect and longtime Southampton resident Peter Marino announced the launch of an eponymous foundation expected in summer 2020. The Peter Marino Art Foundation will be housed in the original Rogers Memorial Library building in Southampton Village.

“I bought it,” Marino says, wickedly, of the historic 1895 structure. He is as impish as a tattooed, bondage-leather-clad, ferocious-jewelry-adorned architect, biker, opera lover and world-class art collector can be.

Georg Baselitz, “Lehr nich ratte much wilm (Lelf bal wile)” (2013)

Marino intends to restore the building and “give people the feeling of what it used to be like,” he says, sitting in his midtown Manhattan office, where cubicles are placed among a dizzying array of art. His collection started in the 1970s with an Andy Warhol bartered for work Marino had done for the artist. It has since grown to include pieces by Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, François-Xavier Lalanne, Richard Prince and Damien Hirst, to name a few, as well as an enormous collection of antiquities.

The Counterpoint show, on display at SAC until Sept. 23, is itself unprecedented in terms of scale, style and blockbuster art, and is designed as a “mini-mini” version of Marino’s ambitious 2014 Bass Museum of Art exhibition in Miami Beach, which showcased both his own work and his vast collection.

Francesco Clemente, “Untitled (Elysian Fields Leaves)” (2013)

The Southampton show is divided into four thematic galleries: gardens, pop art, the Treasury Room and modern German art. Each has an overarching playfulness and a PG-rating designed to attract families. (“There are no weird Mapplethorpes,” Marino promises.) A final space is dedicated to Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 18th-century opera Orfeo ed Euridice, one of Marino’s favorites.

As for the foundation, Marino would like it to function as New York’s Frick Collection does, featuring changing shows from his extensive collection, as well as commissioned work. It will, he hopes, bring “a higher level of visual culture to the Hamptons.” 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, southamptonartscenter.org