Mimmo Rotella

Biography and Formation

An artist of multifaceted personality and intense visual convictions — consistently aligned with an avant-garde sensibility and little concerned with commercial appeal, despite the subjects he depicted — Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro on 7 October 1918. Having completed his artistic training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, he settled in Rome in 1945.

The first phase of his activity was marked by the exploration of diverse pictorial styles, a process that would lead him to revolutionise the artistic languages of the post-war period. In 1951 he mounted his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Chiurazzi in Rome, which was met with considerable resonance.

His name began to attract significant attention, and that same year he was awarded a fellowship by the Fulbright Foundation — an opportunity that enabled him to attend the prestigious University of Kansas City, a remarkable achievement for a young man who had grown up in the deep south of Italy. Rotella repaid the institution with the creation of a mural panel for the Faculty of Physics and with the first recording of the phonetic poems he termed "epistaltici." In 1952 he was invited by Harvard University to give a phonetic poetry performance in Boston, and by the Library of Congress in Washington for the recording of further phonetic compositions.

Décollage and Cinema Posters

On returning to Italy, following a period of reflection on the means of painting and the need for new instruments of expression, he invented the technique of décollage — characterised by the tearing of advertising posters from the streets, whose fragments, whether recto or verso, are affixed to canvas.

Memorable examples of this period include Un poco in su and Collage, both dating from 1954. From 1958 onwards he gradually moved away from purely abstract compositions, producing décollages with clearly legible imagery.

This tendency culminated in the Cinecittà series of 1962 — which includes Eroi in galera and Tre minuti di tempo — and in the series devoted to cinema stars and celebrated personalities (Assalto della notte, 1962; Marilyn calda, 1963, among others). The 1960s and subsequent decades saw the creation of works dedicated to international film posters bearing the faces of the great Hollywood icons.

Paris, Mec Art and New Experimentation

In 1961, at the invitation of the critic Pierre Restany, Rotella joined the Nouveaux Réalistes — a group within which Raymond Hains, Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé and François Dufrêne were already working with advertising posters through processes analogous to his own.

Having moved to Paris in 1964, he continued to develop a new technique, Mec Art, through which he produced works using mechanical processes on emulsified canvases. The first works of this kind were exhibited at the Galerie J in Paris in 1965.

He pursued his experimentation with the Artypo series — typographic proof sheets selected and freely affixed to canvas. In 1972 he published the autobiographical volume Autorotella with the Casa Editrice Sugar, presenting the book at the Circolo Culturale Formentini in Milan with a live performance of his phonetic poems.

The Plastiforme series dates from 1975, exhibited at the Galleria Plura in Milan; that same year he also released the first Italian LP recording of Phonetic Poems 1949–75, with an introduction by Alfredo Todisco.

Later Years and Return to Painting

The 1970s were marked by frequent travels to the United States, India and Nepal, before he settled permanently in Milan in 1980.

The early 1980s brought the Coperture — advertising posters covered with sheets of paper concealing the image beneath — presented at Studio Marconi in Milan and at the Galerie Denis René in Paris (1981).

He returned to painting in the mid-decade with the Cinecittà 2 cycle, revisiting the theme of cinema on large-format canvases, and with the Sovrapitture series on décollage and sheet metal: pictorial interventions on torn posters affixed to metal panels that characterise the most recent phase of his practice.

Exhibitions and International Recognition

In addition to the principal exhibitions of the Nouveaux Réalistes and over one hundred solo shows in Italy and abroad, the artist participated in major national and international exhibitions, among them: The Art of Assemblage (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1961); Oltre l'Informale (IV International Biennial of Art, San Marino, 1963); Vitalità del negativo nell'arte italiana 1960/70 (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1970); Linee della ricerca artistica in Italia 1960/1980 (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1981); Arte Italiana contemporanea (London, Hayward Gallery, 1982); Arte Italiana del XX secolo (London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1989); The Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968 (New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994); and Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).

Mimmo Rotella died in Milan on 9 January 2006.

Discover available works by Mimmo Rotella at Stefanini Arte.