Mimmo Rotella Italian, 1918-2006

Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro, Italy, in 1918. Fascinated by cinema from childhood, he studied at the art high school in Naples before settling in Rome in 1945.

After a stay in the United States, he returned to Rome and produced his first “décollages” in the early 1950s. Walking through the streets, he removed film posters, advertisements and political propaganda posters from walls, tearing and reassembling them in his studio. These fragments became the material for initially abstract compositions, in which layering and lacerations conveyed traces of urban life. The poster, an ephemeral medium of communication, thus became the central material of his work.

In the late 1950s, Rotella reintroduced figuration into his compositions. He collected entire posters and tore away selected sections, revealing major icons of popular culture, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. Between emergence and erasure, his works transform familiar images into fragmented surfaces where faces, letters and slogans intermingle.

In the early 1960s, he joined Nouveau Réalisme at the invitation of Pierre Restany. Settling in Paris in 1965, he formed close ties with the poster artists Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé. He also explored processes for mechanically reproducing images on canvas, notably through Mec-Art, continuing his investigation of the relationship between mass culture and artistic creation.

After settling in Milan, Rotella developed the Blanks in the early 1980s: posters partially covered with plain paper. These works evoke the covering of advertisements when their display contracts expire. Having been torn and then reproduced, the image is now concealed: deprived of its power to entice, it reveals its temporary nature. This economy of means was followed by the sovrapitture, in which the artist painted over torn posters, adding signs, figures and words to their surfaces.

His work was notably presented in the exhibitions High and Low at MoMA in 1990, Italian Metamorphosis at the Guggenheim in New York in 1994 and Face à l’histoire at the Centre Pompidou in 1996. MAMAC in Nice devoted a retrospective to his work in 1999. His works are held in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou. Mimmo Rotella died in Milan in 2006.