Artists - MIMMO ROTELLA

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MIMMO ROTELLA (Catanzaro 1918 - Milan 2006)    

At the end of the 2nd World War (1944), the artist takes again his interrupted studies and obtains the diploma at the Art School Academy. In 1951 he opens his artistic carrer by exhibiting for the first time, together with Tomea, at the Gallery "La Bottega di Tanino Chiurazzi" in Rome. In the same peroid, thanks to an assignment of a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation, he has the opportunity to attend the American Academy of Kansas City. During his american visit in 1951 he undertakes important artistic experiences: he exhibites at Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City (1952) and he is invited to keep a performance of fonetic poetry at Harvard University; besides he cooperates, always during this year, with the Library of Congress Washington for the recording of some experiments on the expression's modalities of pure sounds. When he comes back from the United States (1953), in 1954 he works out the tecnique of décollage, realized with ripped advertising posters and he exhibites his first works at the event organized by the art reviewer Villa in 1955 "Actual Art. Seven painters on Tevere in Sant'Angelo bridge" (Collage, 1954; Un poco in su, 1954; L'orologio si è fermato, 3000 anni avanti Cristo, 1954). During the Fifties his artistic research, still impressed to décollage, goes on taking turns to the use of recto and verso, the use of advertising fragments, the exclusive use of the coloured parts and some marks painted of plaster from which the posters are ripped obtaining a monochrome result. Round about 1958 the décollage's performance shows an artistic tendency much more figurative that supports the best readability of the written documents and of the images. In 1959 he takes part to the exhibition "Giovane pittura a Roma. Accardi, Bignardi, Novelli, Perilli, Rotella, Sanfilippo, Scarpitta", that took place at the roman gallery "La Tartaruga" and in 1961 he is the only italian member that is invited by the critic artist Pierre Restany to agree to the french movement "Nouveau Réalisme", in which context many others décollagistes are already present (Hains, Villeglé and Dufrene). In the same year he takes part to the international exhibition in New York, the Art of Assemblage, in the meantime the year after he begins the ripped plasters collection dedicated to the cinema (Cinecittà) and to the stars and famous characters (Marylin calda, 1962; Sfida western, 1963). In 1964 he shifts to the french capital and attends very frequently the group of the nouveaux réalistes, testing also new artistic methods as the "mec art" (mechanical painting), realized by transferring on emulsified paintings (as the collection Blanks). The presentation of these first creation, called by the artist photoreportages, takes place at the Gallery J in Paris in 1965. During these years and on the decade after he creates and develops further tecnical-artistic procedings, as the Artpos (sample of thypographical prints applied in a fortuitous way on the painting), or the Method of the Artypo-plastique (1967), concerning to plasticize with particular procedings, the images of his reportages printed on the painting. At the beginning of the Eighties his activity distinguishes by the collection Coperture (white sheets of paper fixed in order to hide the images) exhibited both at Marconi Studio in Milan and at Denis René Gallery in Paris, and soon afterwards for the collection "Sovrapitture"(1987), where the paints is lay upon the fragments and the rents of the artist.
He died in Milan in January 2006.

   

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