Mimmo Rotella – Experiments with geometric abstraction
Mimmo Rotella was born Domenico Rotella in Cantanzaro on 7 October 1918. He attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples and moved to Rome in 1941 on acquiring a position as draughtsman for the Ministry for Post and Telecommunications. Conscription for military service pause his studies, which he finally completed after his release in 1944. Between 1944 and 1945, he gave drawing and calligraphy tuition in his hometown of Catanzaro, and in 1945 returned to Rome where he came into contact with the Marxist Italian avant-garde artists of the Gruppo Forma 1 (Carla Accardi, Achille Perilli, Ugo Attardi, Piero Dorazio, Giulio Turcato, Pietro Consagra, Antonio Sanfilippo and Mino Guerrini). From his figurative and experimental beginnings, Rotella found his way to geometric abstraction, inspired by Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, but eventually developed his own alternative form of expression which he described with the self-conceived neologism ‘epostaltici’: phonetic poems, a combination of words, sounds and onomatopoeic loops.
Numerous international exhibition successes
Mimmo Rotella’s first solo exhibition took place in 1951 in the Galeria Chiurazzi in Rome, and he participated for the first time in the Salon des Nouvelles Réalités in Paris. That same year, a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation enabled a trip to the USA and studies at the University of Kansas City, where his experimental phonetic poetry was well received, and he explored the art of Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly. In 1961, he accepted an invitation from Pierre Restany and joined the group Nouvelle Réalisme, living in Paris until 1964, when he moved to Milan, and stayed until his death. He took further trips to Cuba, exhibiting at the University of Havanna, as well as Mexico and Los Angeles, and in 1986, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) invited him to Berlin.
Innovative collages of torn poster scraps
Mimmo Rotella developed a great fascination for torn-up posters in the early 1950s, which he glued to canvases and painted over or added to. These double collages followed in the tradition of Cubism as well as the artist Kurt Schwitters, although his way of using this medium can be seen as a creative achievement and inspired other artists such as François Dufrêne and Raymond Hains. Whilst at the beginning he spread scraps from advertising posters on his canvases, he later cut out faces from film posters, creating the Cinecittà series, with a special interest in Marilyn Monroe. Rotella then developed a process he called Mec-Art, in which he projected negative images onto an emulsion-coated canvas. He participated several times at the Venice Biennale, and played the great galleries and museums of the world. The Foundazione Mimmo Rotella was founded in 2000, aiming on the one hand to preserve the work of its namesake, and on the other, to promote contemporary art.
Mimmo Rotella died in Milan on 9 January 2006.
Mimmo Rotella - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
