MIMMO ROTELLA

One year after his death, Mimmo Rotella returned to Rome with a major exhibition that celebrates his long career, the innovative talent, the ability to get enough back into the game through a happy snap of inspired art and real life. The Mucciaccia Gallery of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Fondazione Rotella, presents an anthology of fifty works that follows the long creative process of the Master, from the charcoals on paper of 1948 until the recent décollages of 2005. The public is going to find significant works of the sixties, historical décollages and oils on canvas of 1950, photographic transfers and Artypo, an exciting journey through political messages and love, ideological militancy and culture of the new metropolis, passion for beauty and long eye on the urban chaos.
Mimmo Rotella died in Milan in 2006 at the age of 87 years: he was a young guy that moved from Catanzaro to Rome to invent life. He went two years in the United States between ’51 and ’52, then returned to Rome in search of novelty and fireworks vanguard. A life as a continuous tear, an overlap of experience and sutures, a collage of colors. His genius will be called décollage and will be an excellent way to bring the city noise in the picture. Since 1954 the artist started peeling posters from the walls and reassembled them on canvas, recreating the sound vision of the urban “caves”, the primitive color of the metropolis multilingual. Within the framework was the cinema, but also politics, militancy and pressing all the chaos that was investing looks. Long before the graffiti Basquiat, before Pop Art, in conjunction with the recycling of urban Rauschenberg, Rotella recorded discomfort, boredom, the collective passions, the fetishes, the political delirium. In short, life with its contamination but also the roots of the future ’68, the ideological tendencies, the growing desire of gossip from the cover. His work with Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Liza Minnelli, Anita Ekberg have become icons … pieces that by themselves increase the sacred aura of the stars, just as it did with close-ups of Andy Warhol. Rotella and Warhol: two sides of the same coin, stratification and synthesis before the fetishes, the authors are able to feel the sadness behind the excess, madness behind the appearance. In the decades Rotella was present in museums and projects of the highest international level.