Mimmo Rotella

“The artist sensitive to what happens in the world should tell with his creativity the most important facts of our lives”

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Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro in October 1918. After his artistic training in Naples, he moved to Rome in 1946 where he worked as a draughtsman exhibiting his first abstract works at the Galleria dei Chiurazzi. In September 1951, he travelled to the United States, where a scholarship enabled him to hold lessons at the Kansas City University inaugurating his first personal show at the Rockhill Nelson Gallery Returning to Italy in the summer of 1952, he underwent a crucial change in stylistic terms, producing his first “décollages” or posters taken from street hoardings of the capital and then tending towards increasingly figurative ones. At the same time, he realized some retro d'affiches with the back of the posters taken from the street: these works were characterized by the presence of materials such as glues, rust and fragments of wood. The décollages - tending later towards increasingly figurative ones - were marked by an aim to break through the constraints of easel painting to portray a city through its own information hoardings. In the 1960s, he was one of the leading exponents of Nouveau Réalisme, a movement led by Pierre Kestany, which included Ives Klein, Jean linguely, Martial Raysse, César, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques Villeglé, Christo and Gérard Deschamps. In 2000 he finally established the Mimmo Rotella Foundation with headquarters in Catanzaro and archive in Milan that would continue until his death.