About

Mario Schifano was born in Homs, Libya, in 1934. Back in Rome with his family, after military service, he began to work with his father, a restorer archaeologist in the Etruscan museum of Valle Giulia. In the meantime, he begins to paint. His debuts are within the informal culture with canvases with a high material thickness, furrowed by a shrewd gestures and marked by some dripping. With this kind of artworks he inaugurated his first solo show in 1959 at the Appia Antica Gallery in Rome. It is however on the occasion of the exhibition that he held the following year at the Galleria La Salita in Rome, in the company of Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio and Uncini, that critics began to take an interest in his work.
In a short time, Schifano will become the main exponent of the famous “Scuola di Piazza del Popolo”, an artistic movement that was born in Rome in the 1960s, composed of a group of artists, including Angeli and Festa, who used to meet in the historic Caffè Rosati in the central Piazza del Popolo.
After the first period in which he paints monochrome pictures, large papers glued on canvas and covered with a single color, tactile, superficial, dripping, on his canvases figures, letters, sign fragments of consumerist civilization soon emerge, such as the Esso brand and Coca Cola, which were linked to pop culture.

However Schifano has always rejected any too close relationship with pop art: “I did my work at the same time, and not subsequently, with pop art. They made pop art and imposed it, almost like a political fact”. Success came early and with success so did the money. “In ’62”, he said, “I went to New York invited to an exhibition organized by Sidney Janes. The exhibition was called The new realist show. They were all there: Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Jasper Johns., Dine, Kline. in a club that was also a business club. Society was chasing me, and the trap was money. ” Schifano has always had an ambivalent relationship with money: on the one hand he sought it, used it and enjoyed it to excess, on the other hand he always shunned the relationship of subjection that money can create for the artist, squandering it in avalanches; This is the double face of Mario Schifano, the one who makes him in all respects a cursed, difficult, controversial contemporary artist, loved and known by everyone, and at the same time often frowned upon and denigrated.

He returned to the States at the end of 1963, after having set up solo exhibitions in Rome, Paris and Milan, and remained there for the first half of the following year, when he was invited to the Venice Biennale. The “Anemic Landscapes” are from this period: a series of canvases in which the natural world is evoked on the thread of memory through fragments, details, allusive writings. The artist works for now in thematic cycles and towards the end of 1964 he accentuates that interest in the reinterpretation of art that will lead him, the following year, to the well-known pieces dedicated to Futurism. After a film experience towards the end of the 1960s, at the beginning of the 1970s he began to reproduce some television images directly on emulsified canvas, isolating them from the narrative rhythm of the sequences to which they belong and re-proposing them with touches of nitro color in an alienating function. In those years he participated in important exhibitions and held solo shows throughout Italy.