Mario Schifano - Emulsified

Mario Schifano was born in Homs, Libya, on September 20, 1934. He began his career in the Informal movement, producing canvases with a highly textured surface. Works of this kind opened his first solo exhibition in 1959 at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome. However, it was during the 1960 exhibition at the Galleria La Salita, where he featured Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio, and Uncini, that critics began to take an interest in his work. Having abandoned Informalism, he now painted monochrome paintings, large sheets of paper glued to canvas and covered with a single, tactile, superficial, dripping color. The painting became a "screen," a starting point, a space for a denied event in which, a few years later, numbers, letters, and symbolic fragments of consumerist civilization would emerge, such as the Esso and Coca-Cola logos.

In 1962, Schifano traveled to the United States; he became familiar with Pop Art, was impressed by the work of Dine and Kline, and exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in the show "The New Realist." In 1964, he was invited to the Venice Biennale for the first time. The artist now worked in thematic cycles: anemic landscapes, and the revisitation of art history with works dedicated to Futurism. He was drawn to images borrowed from the mass media and therefore part of the collective heritage. This phase of Schifano's work was addressed by both attentive critics, such as Maurizio Calvesi, Maurizio Fagiolo, and Alberto Boatto, as well as illustrious writers, such as Alberto Moravia and Goffredo Parise. At Studio Marconi, in 1967, he presented the feature film Anna Carini Seen in August by Butterflies, which was followed by the film trilogy Satellite, Human Non-Human, and Transplant, Consumption, and Death by Franco Brocani. His first cinematic experiences, which he pursued alongside his painting, date back to 1964, and these immediately reveal the artist's critical attention to the uninterrupted flow of images produced by our technological civilization, in which reality is constantly replaced by its "double," be it photography, television, or cinema. He exhibited at the 1982 and 1984 editions of the Venice Biennale.

A focus on the natural characterizes all of Schifano's current work: landscapes, water lilies, fields of wheat, the movement of the sea, and expanses of sand are recreated, reinvented, and filtered through memories, impulses, sensations, surfacings of the deep, and sequences of images conveyed by television sets, advertising, and magazines, and thus take the form of geographies of memory. In 1990, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on the occasion of its reopening, dedicated an exhibition to him entitled "Divulgare," featuring large-scale works created for the occasion. In 1996, Schifano paid homage to his auxiliary Muse, television, understood as a continuous flow of images capable of structuring itself as the true and only all-encompassing reality of our era. While in the late 1960s he limited himself to extracting individual frames from television programs and projecting them decontextualized onto the canvas, now, however, he intervenes pictorially on the images, further changing their meaning.

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.