Mario Martinelli was born in Treviso, Italy. He studied Literature at the University of Padua, where he later completed his PhD. in Contemporary Art. At the same time Mario Martinelli also studied at the ‘Accademia di Belle Arti’ (Academy of Fine Arts) in Venice. He has taught Art History for decades.

Martinelli's work as a theorist and as a teacher has always gone hand-in hand with his research as a practising artist. This research has evolved within a very personal theme of inward reflection, beginning in 1969 with his first 'unwoven canvas'. Chequered patterning on a surface, intended as a pure convention, is the unifying and recurring theme of all Martinelli's work, beginning with the 'stessuti' (unwovens) of the 1970s-1980s to the 'traspareti' which followed, the interplay of light and shadow both on canvass and on the walls of buildings.

Since the early 1990s Martinelli's traspareti have taken on the shape of the shadows that live within them, becoming metaphysical pirates, real entities which enjoy the ambiguous status of being both objects and, at the same time, doubles of the spirit, it's the ‘shadows-in-the-net’.

He exhibited at the 1992 Biennale in Lausanne and at the 1995 Venice Biennale expositions.

Since then, Mario Martinelli has travelled the world and flashed and blown among the city walls the passer-bys’ shadows, thereby emancipating them from the bodies they belonged to and showing them on a screen which disappears little by little. They so become an ephemeral monument of the miraculous inconsistence of men, their get-to-know themselves and their own disappearance (exhibited in Venice, Milan, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo…)

When covered with the mesh of a net, these shadows, like new plastic graffiti, permanently surface on the city walls, which Martinelli insists on humanizing.

Art galleries and institutions all over the world have taken an interest in his work and have helped disseminate it. Art critics and historians consider it a poignant reaction to today’s widespread identity loss and loneliness as well as to our modern cities’ indifference for its citizens.