Mario Schifano - Mater matuta

The work draws on a pop aesthetic in its use of stereotypical images and their mechanical reproduction. Pop Art was born in the United States in the second half of the 20th century as an interest/critique by artists of the contemporary "consumer society." All expressions of Pop Art presuppose a sort of double bond with the world of consumerism and the 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, it is the advertising images and consumer goods themselves that become works of art, as the most genuine and truthful expression of the new society.

This work is a prime example of Mario Schifano's Pop art, but it also demonstrates connections with the poetics of the object brought to the fore by the New Dada and Nouveau Réalisme movements. Indeed, the process involves the depiction of an image/object of everyday use, or culturally massified. The object, in this case, is a statue whose meaning is a direct reference to the iconographic theme of "Motherhood," a theme deeply rooted in all artistic cultures. Formally, the image is rendered in a mechanical, stereotypical manner, but it is tainted by Schifano's pictorialism, using a technique that takes into account the gesturality of Abstract Expressionism. Color interferes with the object, creating emotional and existential tension.

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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