Mimmo Rotella Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918- Milan, 2006). In 1993 he began his artistic studies in Naples, where he obtained a diploma from the Art School in 1944. Read the full biography

Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918- Milan, 2006). In 1993 he began his artistic studies in Naples, where he obtained a diploma from the Art School in 1944. Between 1944 and 1945 he taught drawing in Catanzaro. His works are above all dominated by geometric abstractionism. His first exhibition was held in 1951 in Rome in the Chiurazzi gallery, but it did not achieve much success. During a stay in Paris, he became acquainted with French art, then, thanks to a scholarship, he went to the United States. In 1953, due to a crisis, after interrupting his pictorial production, he was struck by an advertising poster and thus gave life to décollage. Pieces of posters torn from various street posters are glued onto the canvas using the cubist collage technique, contaminated with the Dadaist matrix of the ready made. It follows the practice of double décollage, i.e. the poster is torn twice, first from the poster, then in the laboratory. He received the Graziano Prize in 1956 and the Battistoni and Public Education Prize in 1957. In 1960 he joined the Nouveau Réalisme. In 1961 in Paris he exhibited in the exhibition À 40° audessus de Dada, in 1964 he participated in the Venice International Art Biennale and in 1965 at the IX Quaedriennale in Rome. Between 1967 and 1973, he created the Art-typo with which he superimposed the advertising images. He intervenes on the magazines with solvents, reducing them to imprints (frottage) or erasing them (effacage) or he crumples the posters by closing them in plexiglass cubes. In 1980 he moved to Milan where he created "blanks", advertising posters covered with white sheets. In 1992 he received the title of Officiel des arts ede Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Since 1997 he has also been interested in digital painting.