MIMMO ROTELLA* (Catanzaro 1918 - 2006 Milan)Elvis, 1995paper...

Estimate

€10,000 - €20,000

MIMMO ROTELLA*
(Catanzaro 1918 - 2006 Milan)
Elvis, 1995
paper print painted with acrylic/plexiglass, 184 x 57.3 cm
signed Rotella
provenance: Aguttes auctions, Paris 2008, International private collection

ESTIMATE °€ 10.000 - 20.000
STARTING PRICE °€ 10.000

Mimmo Rotella/Domenico Rotella was an Italian artist. Rotella graduated in art from the Naples Academy of Art in 1944. After his art studies, Rotella began with representational paintings and soon experimented with expressive abstract paintings. In 1951/1952 he lived in Kansas City on a Fulbright grant, where he produced murals and recorded phonetic poems ("epostaltici"). In the U.S. he became acquainted with the works of the then current American artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1953 he discovered the aesthetic appeal of torn-off posters (MANIFESTI LACERATI). These torn-off posters, decollages, a European counter-position to Pop Art, are in the tradition of the Cubists and Kurt Schwitters and constitute the core of Rotella's work. Inspired by Rotella, other artists also used this method (François Dufrêne, Raymond Hais; the early Wolf Vostell). He exhibited at the "Salon des Réalistes Nouvelles" in Paris and joined the Nouveau Réalisme group (Pierre Restany) in 1961. Rotella became acquainted with the lively art scene of 1950s France; in addition, American-style Abstract Expressionism and Informal painting influenced his further career; he created assemblages with everyday objects such as beverage caps, ropes, cords. In the late 1960s, Rotella turned to typographic works (Artypo works), to work on magazine advertisements in the early 1970s. If in the 1970s he had rolled up posters and enclosed them in Plexiglas cubes, in the 1980s he began to paste over posters with neutral paper. In 1989, Rotella stayed in Berlin at the invitation of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). While Rotella initially transferred posters or layers of posters from billboards to canvas ("double décollage"), tearing off sections and partially painting over them, he later switched to pasting poster backs onto the canvas. In addition to posters, he often used parts of the metal or wooden bases of billboards in public spaces. Rotella varied his method in many ways, used very different materials (up to the airplane wing) and often painted over his works. In 1958 Mimmo Rotella created paintings from movie posters (series Cinecittà), in 2005 twelve portraits of Marilyn Monroe.

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