Mario Schifano - Untitled

The work draws on an Informal aesthetic language. The devastation wrought by World War II left a profound mark on Western civilization, which in the visual arts also resulted in an inability to communicate. For some artists, this challenge led to a complete rejection of any visual language, resulting in the birth of Informal Art. The various Informal movements are certainly connected to American Abstract Expressionism, especially with regard to the gestural component, but they go further in their rejection of any figurative element, even geometric. Their research focuses instead on the material from which their works are composed.

This work is particularly interesting because it demonstrates Mario Schifano's total commitment to an informal aesthetic. In much of the Roman artist's work, the abstraction of the subject is achieved by reducing reality, nature, to a banal, simplified image, according to a concept linked to Pop Art. In this case, however, another fundamental component of Schifano's poetics clearly prevails: gesture, which he, like other exponents of the Piazza del Popolo School, draws from the teachings of American Abstract Expressionism. Thus, the image becomes completely inaccessible, and, with an almost brutal operation of synthesis, the artist's forceful gesture predominates. The surface is completely two-dimensional, with no concession to spatial depth. The brushstrokes delineate the non-forms in a very tormented and nervous manner. Color is used according to an emotional and spiritual interpretation, without any connection to reality. The concept remains constant: for Mario Schifano, the two-dimensionality of the painted surface is comparable to that of a television screen, a monitor. For this reason, his pictorial approach, linked to the gesturality of American Abstract Expressionism, can also be interpreted as interference, an electrical disturbance in a vision of the world filtered through technology.

Mario Schifano was a Roman artist born in 1934 in Homs, Libya. He was the leading exponent of the Piazza del Popolo School. This group of painters met at the Caffè Rosati and shared an artistic language inspired by Pop Art, but with a new sensibility also influenced by the experiments of American Abstract Expressionism. The use of symbols of consumer society, repeated serially, is distinctly Pop, but their pictorial interpretation, whether dirty or textured, or using gestural techniques like dripping, offers a new vision and a different reconfiguration. Mario Schifano passed away in Rome in 1998.

The transaction takes place with maximum security for both the seller and the buyer. We take care of the conformity (provenance, authenticity, state of conservation) of the work and handle the shipping.
Returns are possible no later than 14 days after receiving the order.