Mario Schifano - Aquarium

The work draws on a pop aesthetic in its use of famous or mass-produced images and their pictorial reworking. Pop Art emerged in the United States in the second half of the 20th century as a result of artists' interest in and critique of the contemporary "consumer society." All expressions of Pop Art presuppose a sort of double bond with the world of consumerism and mass media. On the one hand, the artwork is reduced to a mere consumer product, thanks to the use of advertising language in the works and their serial reproduction through mechanical processes. On the other hand, as in this case, the mass-produced images themselves become works of art, as a more genuine and truthful expression of the new society and thanks to the artist's recontextualization.

In this series of works, we can appreciate Mario Schifano's different approach to mass-produced and popular images (in this case, four fish in an aquarium). The underlying concept is always the same: to reconfigure a familiar, even banal, image through a pictorial process. This pictorial process, as always with Schifano, involves gestural techniques akin to American Abstract Expressionism. The difference in this series of works is that the artist, with his gestures, affects only the background, recreating the pop image in negative. Compositionally, we can appreciate how the image and the artist's gestures interact, blending together thanks to the effects of paint dripping.

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.

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