Mimmo ROTELLA - Top Gun, Seridécollage

Mimmo Rotella : (1918-2006) is an italian artist, who was born in 1918 in Catanzaro and who died in 2006 in Milano. In 1945, he settled in Rome et started his painter carreer, after studying art in Napoli. He started with figurative art, but soon elaborated an visual expression mode of neo-geometric origin. He made his first personal exhibition in 1951 at the Gallery Chiurazzi in Rome where he presented abstract and geometric works, which were not much appreciated by the critic. In 1951-1952, he went to the US and met artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Later, he met Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko in Rome in 1960. Afterwards, he went through a long crisis period, as he was convinced thant everything had already been made in art. He managed to get out of it when he discover the advertisment posters, as an artistic expresson and messenger through the city. He exhibited for the first time his lacerated posters in 1955. With the series "Cinecittà" (1958), he worked on cinema posters, onto which he isolated faces and figures. He was friend with the french art critic Pierre Restany, he joined the movement "Nouveau Realisme" (New Realism) in 1960. In 1961, he took part in the exhibition « 40° au-dessus de Dada » (40° above Dada), organized in Paris by Restany, with Arman, Cesar, yves Klein, Deschamps, Villeglé, Hains, and he settled in Paris. Rotella moved back to Milano in 1980, where he died in 2006.