Mimmo Rotella

Galleria Notizie, Turin

Private Collection, Turin (acquired from the above in 1972)

Thence by descent to the present owners

Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Gallery, The VII Tokyo Biennale 1963, 1963, n.p., no. 109, illustrated

Madrid, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Memoria del futuro: arte italiano desde las primeras vanguardias a la posguerra, 1990-91, curated by Germano Celant and Ida Gianelli, p. 464, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The tears, glue residue and folds in the paper are due to the technique and method of execution chosen by the artist.
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Avventuroso 2 is a fiercely dynamic blend of text, photography, line and colour that exemplifies Mimmo Rotella’s avant-garde facture. We are presented with an engrossing visual cacophony: from the upper left-hand corner, two grim faces peer out of an unknown sepia scene, while on the right side of the lower edge, across a slew of striated text, Audrey Hepburn peers over her shoulder in coquettish repose. Rotella had begun to make his décollage works as early as 1953. In their production, he raided the advertising posters of Rome armed with a pen knife, before taking them back to his studio and engaging a laborious process of layering up and tearing away, eventually resulting in the diaphanous patchwork effect endemic to the present picture. They are engaging, vibrant, vigorous works that have taken a position of supreme importance within the art-historical discourse of the Twentieth Century. Avventuroso 2 is further important, even amongst their number: it was exhibited at the 1963 Tokyo Biennale and has been held in the same prestigious private collection since 1972.

It is easy to view Rotella as the Italian answer to Andy Warhol. The two artists were active during very similar periods and shared many of the same artistic and conceptual preoccupations. Both were obsessed with cinema: Warhol was obsessed by the stars of the silver screen and Rotella similarly allowed the imagery and style of Hollywood to soak into his praxis. Rotella and Warhol even shared the same celebrity crushes: Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedy family. Moreover, both relied on the brazen appropriation of marketing and advertising imagery in the creation of their best known works: where Warhol reproduced his Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans in painted facsimile, Rotella transliterated the posters of Rome into his works directly. Both Warhol and Rotella were innovators in adopting printing technologies for their fine art practice, with Andy Warhol pioneering the use of silkscreen and Rotella subverting a billboard printing technology known as Artypo in order to further inject his work with a machine-like aesthetic. Rotella had travelled to America in the early 1950s after winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Missouri. It is indisputable that this formative experience allowed the American zeitgeist to bleed into his oeuvre in a manner that is entirely redolent of Warhol.

However, to view this artist as a transatlantic understudy working perennially in thrall to Warhol’s far off Factory would be to misunderstand his close links with the European avant-garde. Rotella had met the widely reputed curator Pierre Restany in 1958 and in 1960 had become one of the founding members of the Nouveau Réalisme group. Restany recounted the significance of the moment: “I got to meet Rotella in January 1958… My ideas about modern, urban, industrial, and mass medial nature, upon which I based my theory of Nouveau Réalisme, were coming to a point of full crystallization… Our meeting in 1958 was a determinant factor in Mimmo’s career: it contributed towards snapping this magical circle of silence which isolated him and caused the evolution of his appropriative technique to quickly gather momentum” (Pierre Restany, ‘Mimmo Rotella, a casa sua di fronte alla storia,’ in: Exh. Cat., Catanzaro, Complesso Monumentale di San Giovanni, Mimmo Rotella, 1999, p. 32). The other members of the Nouveau Réalisme group – Yves Klein, César, Arman, and Jean Tinguely – provided Rotella with an invaluable peer group, united by artistic ideology. They all viewed figurative art as unacceptable – bourgoies and boring – and had become similarly disillusioned by the academic dogma of abstraction. Thus they resorted to reproducing the world directly into their art, creating a new reality. In this context, we can understand that, while their aesthetics are dramatically different, Rotella’s décollage works were created in the same conceptual vein as César’s Compressions, Arman’s smashed violins, and even Yves Klein’s Eponge Reliefs; shreds of reality, transmuted, translated, and immortalised into each artist’s inimitable language.

Avventuroso 2 is a fantastic example of the manner in which Mimmo Rotella was able to blend the influences of the European avant-garde, the American Pop movement, and his own creative inspiration. It stands as homage not only to the recalcitrant energy of urban life but also to the transient glamour of cinema and celebrity.