Mario Schifano

The Italian artist Mario Schifano was born in Libya on September 20, 1934. After the Second World War, the family moves back to Rome. Mario Schifano is considered one of the outstanding artists of postmodernism in Italy, he also makes a name for himself internationally as a filmmaker, film producer and musician. Important representative of postmodernism in Italy. Mario Schifano's visual art work includes paintings in mixed media, collages and reworked photographs that quickly make him famous. In the 1960s, together with Tano Festa, Franco Angeli and others, he founded the group "Scuola di Piazza del Popolo"; their meeting place became the Caffè Rosati in the piazza of the same name, and the gallery owner Plinio De Martiis exhibited the artists in his Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome. In 1962 Mario Schifano is invited to New York by the Sidney Janis Gallery to be one of the few European artists to take part in the seminal exhibition "New Realists", which also features the works of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The reverberations of American Pop Art are also evident in Mario Schifano's works, and he now increasingly uses elements from advertising in his works. Art, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll. Mario Schifano became interested in television and the moving image at an early age. He is convinced that therein lies the future of painting. Many of his canvases from the 1960s have a basic square shape that refers to the television screen. Yet deliberate drips, gestural painting and traces of dirt always remind us that these are paintings that express the unstoppable flow of words, sounds, writing and images. Especially in the 1960s and still until the 1990s, Mario Schifano also made numerous films. He is friends with the rock stars of the band Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards make a brief guest appearance in Mario Schifano's 1968 film "Umano non umano". Mario Schifano is also said to have inspired the Rolling Stones to write their song "Monkey Man" on the album "Let It Bleed" (1969). In 1963 Mario Schifano has a brief liaison with the It girl of the 1960s Anita Pallenberg, in 1969 likewise with the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull. Throughout his life Mario Schifano struggled with drug and alcohol problems, the excesses of his life in the 1960s and 1970s as well as his exuberant creativity are reflected in his artistic works. He has the label of the maledetto, the cursed artist, as an epithet. Significant artistic contribution to post-war painting. Numerous galleries and museums around the world show Mario Schifano's works, including the exhibition "Identité Italienne" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, curated by Germano Celant in 1981, and "Italian Art in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy, London, in 1989. Mario Schifano participates in the Venice Biennale in 1982 and 1984. In 1990 the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome shows the retrospective "Divulgare/Disclosure", for which newly created large-scale works by Mario Schifano are produced. Mario Schifano dies in Rome on January 26, 1998.