Collection: Mimmo Rotella

(Catanzaro 1918 - Milan 2006)

Mimmo Rotella was an undisputed protagonist of the international avant-garde, with a vast production between Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme. After a youthful painting experimentation, he arrived at what the artist himself defined as a “Zen Enlightenment,” a revelation that allowed him to intuit the visual power of advertising graphics. It was from this personal innovation that the technique he invented, décollages, was born: by tearing and assembling on the canvas portions of advertising posters taken from the streets of Rome, often depicting movie stars, Rotella reworked the Dadaist vision of ready made and Cubist collage.
The original graphic activity constitutes a fundamental pillar of his production: far from reproducing paintings, Rotella transferred his urban aesthetics directly onto the matrices, creating author multiples with extraordinary impact. Through lithographs, silkscreens, and especially the famous multiple graphic décollages, he reinterpreted the myths of cinema and advertising to bring forth new visual short circuits. Invited to the Venice Biennials (memorable was his personal room in 1964) and awarded in 2002 by the President of the Republic with the Gold Medal for Visual Arts, the artist elevated editorial graphics with an unmatched material energy and technical precision.