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MIMMO ROTELLA

(Catanzaro 1918 – Milano 2006)
Between 1951 and 1952 Rotella participated in various exhibitions and held his first solo show at Galleria Chiurazzi in Rome. He obtained a Fulbright Foundation grant and went to the University of Kansas City (Missouri), first as a student and later as artist in residence. For the occasion he created a mural panel for the university, in the hall of the faculty of Geology. He returned to Italy and settled in Rome in a studio near Piazza del Popolo. In the following years, back in Rome, Rotella goes through a period of crisis, during which he interrupts his research, while continuing to compose phonetic or epistatic poetry.He began to compose works on canvas to which he applied parts of the torn papers he tore from advertising posters on the street: thus was born décollage, which is the opposite of collage. While collage operates a superimposition of images, décollage operates a subtraction of the image through tears, and abrasions of the figures. The peculiarity of Mimmo Rotella’s work is that he also uses the back of the collage called the “retro d’affiche.”
Settling in Milan, in the 1980s he gives course to the Blanks series, in which he covers posters with monochrome sheets.Beginning in 1984 he resumed painting, producing the Cinecittà 2 cycle of works and later the Sovrapitture, where he intervenes pictorially on advertising posters. He exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1994. In 2000, the Mimmo Rotella Foundation was established with the goal of fostering contemporary art and preserving the artist’s work. He died in Milan on January 8, 2006.