Mimmo Rotella

Mimmo Rotella with Pierre Restany and Filippo Panseca

Mimmo Rotella (born October 7, 1918 in Catanzaro as Domenico Rotella , † January 9, 2006 in Milan ) was an Italian artist .

Life

After attending high school, Mimmo Rotella studied at the Naples Art Academy . The studies were interrupted from 1941 onwards because of a job for the Post and Telecommunications Ministry in Rome and through military service until 1944. Rotella graduated from art school in 1944 and moved to Rome in 1945.
In 1951/1952 he lived on a Fulbright scholarship in Kansas City , where he made murals and recorded phonetic poems. During his stay in the USA he got to know the works of the then current American artists such as Claes Oldenburg , Jackson Pollock , Robert Rauschenberg and others.
In 1961 he joined the group des Nouveau Réalisme in Paris , led by Pierre Restany . In 1964 he moved to Paris and in 1980 to Milan , where he lived and worked until his death. In 1989 he stayed in Berlin at the invitation of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) .

In 1991 Rotella married Inna Agarounova from Russia. In 1993 their daughter Asya was born. In 2006, Mimmo Rotella died of pneumonia on January 9th at his home in Milan.

plant

After studying art, Mimmo Rotella began with representational paintings and soon experimented with expressive abstract images. In 1949 Rotella turned to the creation of phonetic poems, which he called "epostaltici". In 1951 Rotella's first contacts in France were made and he exhibited at the “Salon des Realistes Nouvelles” in Paris.

In 1953 he discovered the aesthetic appeal of torn posters . From then on he worked with this medium ( MANIFESTI LACERATI ). These torn posters, décollages , are in the tradition of the Cubists , but also of Kurt Schwitters, and make up the core of his artistic work. In this form, the tear-off of the poster can be seen as Rotella's 'invention'. Inspired by Rotella's practice, other artists also use this method (e.g. Dufrêne or Hains ). The early Wolf Vostell was also influenced by this artistic attitude.
Using set pieces from everyday urban life, advertising, he created a European counter-position to American Pop Art and was nevertheless very close to it. Rotella initially transferred posters or layers of posters from billboards onto the canvas (“double décollage ”), tore off sections and partially painted over them, and later switched to sticking the backs of the posters onto the canvas, which achieved novel abstract effects. In addition to posters, he often also used parts of the metal or wooden bases on billboards in public spaces. Rotella varied his method in many ways, used very different materials (up to the aircraft wing) and often he painted over his works. As early as 1958, Mimmo Rotella was creating images from film posters ( Cinecittà series ). This examination of the icons of the film accompanied him into the last year of his life. In 2005 he was still creating a series of twelve works with portraits of Marilyn Monroe .

With his connection to the group des Nouveau Réalisme in Paris, Rotella got to know the lively art scene of France in the 1950s, but American-style Abstract Expressionism and informal painting also influenced his further artistic career. Soon he was no longer just creating torn posters , but also assemblages with everyday objects such as beverage caps , ropes, cords, etc. In the late 1960s, Rotella turned to typographic works (Artypo works) in order to process advertisements in magazines in the early 1970s . At the same time, Rotella continued to work on phonetic poems, so that in 1976 his first Italian record was released. In the 1970s he had rolled up posters and enclosed them in plexiglass cubes, but in the 1980s he began to cover posters with neutral paper (as if in preparation for a new poster). Influenced by graffiti , he also tore off posters, stuck them on canvas and described them with signs and sayings.

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1951: Galleria Chiurazzi, Rome, Italy
• 1964: Venice Biennale , Italy
• 1986: University of Havana, Cuba
• 1990: Center Pompidou, Paris, France

Awards

• 1956: Award Graziano, Italy
• 1957: Award Battistoni e della Pubblica Istruzione, Italy
• 1992: Officiel des arts et des Lettres, France
• 1994: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA

literature

• Dufrene, Hains, Rotella, Villegle, Vostell . Torn posters from the Cremer Collection, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1971 (without ISBN)
• Sam Hunter, Mimmo Rotella. Décollages 1954–1964. Galleria Marconi, Electa, Milan, 1986.
• Mimmo Rotella . Martin Hentschel, Kerber Verlag, 1998, ISBN 978-3924639976 .
• Mimmo Rotella. American Icons and Early Works . Meredith Malone, Mullen Books Inc., New York, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9820-7493-0 .
• Big city poetry. The Affichists . Bernard Blistène, Fritz Emslander, Esther Schlicht, Didier Semin, Dominique Stella, Snoeck Verlag, 2014. ISBN 978-3-9523990-8-8 .

Web links

• Fondazione Mimmo Rotella
• Galerie Reckermann, Cologne, picture examples ( Memento from May 9, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
• Big city poetry. The Affichists . Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2015

See also: Décollage