Mimmo Rotella - The Cat on the Roof

Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro in 1918, but after completing middle school, he decided to move to Naples to pursue art studies. After securing a job at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in 1941, he moved to Rome, where he remained only briefly due to his military service. In 1944, he graduated from the Art School of Naples, followed by a period teaching drawing in Catanzaro. The following year, he returned to Rome, where, after initially focusing on figurative art, he began his first experiments in neo-geometric art. From 1947, he began participating in his first exhibitions, and in 1949, he also devoted himself to experiments with phonetic poetry, known as epistalica. His first solo exhibition was held in 1951 at the Chiurazzi Gallery in Rome, where he exhibited his abstract-geometric works, but they failed to garner critical acclaim. That same year, he also began to have his first contact with foreign art, particularly French and American. He received a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation, which allowed him to travel to the United States as "Artist in Residence" at the University of Kansas City. He also held another solo exhibition in Kansas City at the Rockhill Nelson Gallery. This experience allowed Rotella to discover and meet all the major representatives of the most innovative American artistic movements of the time. After a brief hiatus in his artistic production, due to his belief that nothing new could be done in art, thanks to what he called a "Zen illumination," his work resumed with his famous decollages. Mimmo Rotella grasped the full communicative power of advertising posters, considering them an artistic expression of the city. Thus, he began to glue pieces of torn posters found on the street onto canvas, presenting them for the first time in Rome at the exhibition "Esposizione dell'arte attuale." This new trend culminated in the "Cinecittà" series, created in 1962, and in the series dedicated to world cinema figures, the faces of the great legends of Hollywood cinema. Between 1956 and 1957, he received his first recognition with the Graziano Prize and the Battistoni Prize. His partnership with the French critic Pierre Restany led him to join the Nouveau Réalisme movement, of which Restany was a theoretician, although he was not among the signatories of the manifesto. In addition to decollages, he began working on assemblages of various objects purchased, usually from second-hand dealers. In addition to exhibiting abroad, he was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1964 and the Rome Quadriennale in 1965. From the early 1970s, he began working on several works, intervening on advertising pages with solvents that reduced them to the imprint stage or erased the image. He also devoted himself to writing, publishing his autobiography, Autorotella, and recording his first album of phonetic poetry. In 1977, he joined "Cooperarte," a cooperative of artists united by the goal of exploring new forms of engagement and interaction with the public. In 1990, he participated in the "Art et Pub" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in the "High and Low" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Thanks to the introduction of new technologies, he began to develop an interest in digital painting, sponsoring "Digipainting," the first international exhibition on digitalism, held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Fontane in 1997. Meanwhile, he continued to exhibit his work at major museums, especially in Paris and the United States. With the aim of collecting the works and documentation relating to his artistic career, the Mimmo Rotella Foundation was established in 2000, in accordance with his wishes. In 2004, he received an honorary degree in Architecture from the Università degli Studi Mediterranea in Reggio Calabria. Mimmo Rotella passed away in 2006. His works are now in numerous museums and major Italian and foreign collections.

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.