Mario Schifano

“I want to paint painting”

Mario Schifano was born in Homs in Libya in 1934. He made his debut in 1960 with an exhibition at the Galleria La Salita in Rome presented by Pierre Restany entitled Five Roman painters: Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio, Schifano, Uncini, subsequently signing an exclusive contract with the American gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend. He immediately attracted the interest of critics by creating monochrome paintings that gave the idea of a photographic screen with numbers, letters, road signs, the Esso and Coca Cola brands. Echoes of the pop art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg converged there and became even more pronounced after his trip to New York in 1962. Proceeding through thematic cycles he created works of political commitment with which he had the ambition to reconstruct the history of revolutions . However, an ideological and existential crisis forced him into periods of isolation in his studio where he created works reinterpreting Magritte, De Chirico, Boccioni, Cézanne, Picabia. From 1970, he produced the so-called Televisions, i.e. Polaroids taken by himself of television programs, printed on canvas and modified with dissonant colours. In the following years he devoted himself with more interest to photography and television as commercial media, multiplying the production of serial paintings. He died in 1998 after a heart attack.