From 13 June 2014 Palazzo Reale presents the exhibition “Mimmo Rotella. Décollages e retro d'affiches”, curated by Germano Celant, promoted and produced by the City of Milan – Culture, Palazzo Reale, Mimmo Rotella Institute and Mimmo Rotella Foundation.
The exhibition – in which there are about one hundred and sixty works – focuses on the period that extends from 1953, the year of the first experiments on the torn poster, to 1964 when Rotella participates in the XXXII Venice Biennale. A specific moment of maximum research at a global level which makes use of important loans from national and international public and private collections, including the Museo del Novecento in Milan, MACRO in Rome, Carré d'Art-Musée d'art contemporain in Nîmes and Musée National d'art moderne - Center Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern, London, Mart - Museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, National Gallery of modern and contemporary art, Rome.
To contextualize Rotella's work within the international artistic scene of the time and understand his contribution and originality, some works are exhibited that compare with those of other great protagonists of modern and contemporary art, European and American , such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, Raymond Hains, Andy Warhol and Michelangelo Pistoletto.
The itinerary of the exhibition analyzes some of the founding moments in the beginning of the artist's career. In Rome, where he moved immediately after his return to Italy from his residency at Kansas City University in 1952, Rotella established a dialogue both with the previous generation and with his peers. It is in this context that he uses a symbol of the reborn urban context: the advertising poster.
His experimentation leads him to remodel the poster in every possible way: as a starting unit for the study of the material aspect that it assumes in contact with the raw canvas, as an elementary particle for the construction of an abstract imaginary and as a study of the form which is formed on the back of the poster, through the action of glues and rusts.
Following the path of Rotella's career, those works created close to the Sixties are identified and presented in the exhibition, the moment in which he weaves his first relations with France - through the Nouveau Réalisme - and the United States, where already in 1961 he participates in the Museum of Modern Art in New York at “The Art of Assemblage”. Increasingly active between Rome and Paris, Rotella has the opportunity to work closely with Pop Art artists and to open his horizons on the American context, an experience that culminates in 1962 with a personal exhibition at the Bonino Gallery in Buenos Aires and with the participation to “New Realists”, at the Sidney Janis gallery in New York.
