THE SWEET LIFE - MIMMO ROTELLA

An artist with a multifaceted personality and intense visual concepts always aligned with an avant-garde taste, Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro on October 7, 1918. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples , he settled in Rome in 1945. The first phase of his career was characterized by experimentation with different pictorial styles, which would lead him to revolutionize the artistic languages ​​of the post-war period. In 1951, Rotella held his first solo exhibition at the Chiurazzi Gallery in Rome, which received widespread acclaim. Rotella's paintings began to arouse considerable interest, so much so that that same year he was awarded a scholarship by the Fulbright Foundation . This enabled him to attend the prestigious University of Kansas City . Rotella reciprocated by creating a mural panel in the Physics Department and by recording the first phonetic poems he defined as "epistaltic." In 1952 he was invited by Harvard University to perform a phonetic poetry performance in Boston and by the Library of Congress in Washington to record some phonetic poems. Back in Italy, after a period of reflection on the means of painting and the need to use new tools, he invented the " décollage " technique, characterized by tearing off advertising posters posted in the streets and pasting the fragments, whether front or back, onto the canvas. Memorable examples of this phase are "Un poco in su" and "Collage", both from 1954. From 1958 Rotella gradually abandoned purely abstract compositions to create décollages with clearly legible images. This trend culminated in the "Cinecittà" series, created in 1962 (which includes "Eroi in galera" and "Tre minuti di tempo") and in the series dedicated to movie stars and famous people ("Assalto della notte", 1962; "Marilyn calda", 1963 and so on). From the 1960s onwards, Mimmo Rotella dedicated his works to posters of world cinema featuring the faces of Hollywood's greats. In 1961, at the invitation of critic Pierre Restany , he joined the Nouveaux Réalistes group, in which Raymond Hains, Jacques Mah de la Villeglè, and Francois Dufrène were already using advertising posters with processes similar to his. Having moved to Paris in 1964, the painter Mimmo Rotella continued to work on the definition of a new technique, Mec Art , with which he creates works using mechanical processes on emulsion canvases. In 1972 he published the autobiographical volume “Autorotella” for the Sugar publishing house, performing his phonetic poems at the book presentation at the Circolo Culturale Formentini in Milan. Mimmo Rotella's works from the 1970s are marked by frequent trips to the USA, India, Nepal, before finally settling in Milan in 1980. The “ Coperture ” belong to the early 1980s, posters that Mimmo Rotella covers with sheets of paper that hide the image underneath. He returned to painting in the mid-1990s with the "Cinecittà 2" series, which explored the theme of cinema on large-scale canvases, and with the " Sovratipture " series on collage and sheet metal. These pictorial interventions on torn posters glued to metal panels characterize the artist's most recent period. He died in Milan on January 8, 2006. Mimmo Rotella's works are on sale at stable medium-high prices.

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