Knoedler & Company is pleased to announce our representation of Mimmo Rotella (1918–2006) with the gallery’s first exhibition of his work, presented in association with Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan. This will also be the first solo exhibition of Rotella’s work in New York since 2000. Twent... Read more
Knoedler & Company is pleased to announce our representation of Mimmo Rotella (1918–2006) with the gallery’s first exhibition of his work, presented in association with Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan. This will also be the first solo exhibition of Rotella’s work in New York since 2000. Twenty-one works will be exhibited, spanning more than three decades, from 1954 to 1990, and including examples of: the artist’s early, abstract retro d’affiches (collaged backs of found posters); his artypos (“art + typography,” in which Rotella appropriated galley proofs of posters taken from commercial print shops); his Mec Art (“mechanical art”) photoreportages (in which enlarged negatives made from magazines and newspapers are projected directly onto canvas treated with photographic emulsion); the sovrapitture (in which the fronts of posters are overpainted in acrylic, with graffiti-like markings); and finally the décollages (literally, the ungluing of paper), the process for which Rotella is considered an early innovator, and for which he is perhaps best known. In his décollages, Rotella would tear, or “lacerate” posters from public walls, glue them to canvas, and then tear them again, to create—in the earliest examples—highly abstract gestural compositions. As Meredith Malone writes,
The surface of the torn poster (be it recto or verso) proved to be a site of rich discovery for the artist as it supplied him with a seemingly endless store of imagery, at first abstract and then increasingly related to mass consumerism and the cinema.
Following a trajectory that paralleled that of American Pop art, Rotella—who in 1960 joined the Paris-based Nouveaux Réalistes, brought together by Pierre Restany—gradually grew more focused on the appropriated imagery in his “lacerations,” and also came to recognize the act of appropriation as a form of protest. As he stated, to tear the posters off the wall is the unique compensation for a society that has lost its taste for change and for fabulous transformations. From the early 1960s on, a fascination with American popular culture emerged as a recurrent theme in his work. Knoedler’s exhibition includes images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Andy Warhol, and the Statue of Liberty, among other American icons.
