Mimmo Rotella

Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro, Italy, on October 7th, 1918, and after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, he settled in Rome in 1945. The first phase of his activity is characterized by experimentation with different painting styles that will lead him to revolutionize postwar artistic languages. In 1951 Rotella held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Chiurazzi in Rome, which gained wide resonance. Rotella’s paintings thus began to attract considerable interest, so significantly that in the same year he obtained a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation to attend the prestigious University of Kansas City. Rotella paid homage to the institution, with the creation of a mural panel in the Faculty of Physics and with the first recording of the phonetic poems he called “epistaltic.” Back in Italy, after a phase of reflection on the means of painting and the need to use new tools, he invented the technique of “dècollage,” characterized by tearing down advertising posters posted in the streets whose fragments, whether the recto or verso, are glued to the canvas. From 1958 Rotella gradually abandoned purely abstract compositions to make dècollage with clearly legible images. This trend culminates in the series “Cinecittà “, made in 1962, and in the series dedicated to movie stars and famous people .

In 1961 Mimmo Rotella joined, at the invitation of the critic Pierre Restany, the Nouveaux Rèalistes group, in whose sphere Raymond Hains, Jacques Mah de la Villeglè, and Francois Dufrène were already using advertising posters with procedures similar to his own. Moving to Paris in 1964, the painter was still working on the definition of a new technique, Mec Art, with which he produced works using mechanical procedures on emulsified canvases.

In 1972 he published the autobiographical volume “Autorotella” for Sugar Publishing House, exhibiting his phonetic poems in a performance at the presentation of the book at the Circolo Culturale Formentini in Milan.

Mimmo Rotella’s works of the 1970s are marked by frequent trips to the U.S., India, Nepal, to settle permanently in Milan in 1980. Belonging to the early 1980s are the “Covers,” posters covered with sheets that conceal the underlying image.

He returned to painting in the middle of the decade with the “Cinecittà 2” cycle, in which he resumed the theme of cinema addressed in large canvases, and with the “Sovrapitture” series on collage and sheet metal: these pictorial interventions on torn posters glued on metal panels characterize the artist’s most recent season. Rotella died in Milan on January 8, 2006.