Mario Schifano

related shows

Il Pianeta delle immagini dinosaure
Istantanea
I Vizi Capitali
Doppio Sguardo

artists

Accardi Carla
Arman
Chia Sandro
Cingolani Marco
Crippa Roberto
De Angelis Marcello
Facco Andrea
Festa Tano
Finzi Ennio
Fontana Franco
Frangi Giovanni
Galliano Daniele
Gao Brothers
Germanà Mimmo
Hermann Nitsch
Innocente
Kim Joon
Kostabi Mark
Laboratorio Saccardi
Licata Riccardo
Liu Bolin
Ma Liuming
Montesano Gian Marco
Neri Marco
Paladino Mimmo
Pancrazzi Luca
Perilli Achille
Rotella Mimmo
Schifano Mario
Turcato Giulio
Vaccari Wainer

artworks

Dove siamo 160x130 cm n. 175	Nottetempo 160x130 cm n. 174	Scultore tedesco 150x150 cm n. 173	... 205x280 cm. n. 172
... 51x73 cm. n. 171	... 51x73 cm. n. 170	... 73x51 cm. n. 169	Ti ci porto 160x130 cm. n. 168
... 100x130 cm. n. 166	... 100x130 cm. n. 165	... 100x130 cm. n. 164	... 73x51 cm. n. 163
... 51x73 cm. n. 162	... 51x73 cm. n. 161	... 51x73 cm. n. 160	... 73x51 cm. n. 159
... 51x73 cm. n. 158	... 51x73 cm. n. 157	... 73x51 cm. n. 156	... 73x51 cm. n. 155
... 51x73 cm. n. 154	... 73x51 cm. n. 153	Istantanea 10x15 cm n. 152	Istantanea 10x15 cm n. 151
Istantanea 10x15 cm n. 150	Istantanea 10x15 cm n. 149	Istantanea 10x15 cm n. 148	Istantanea 10x15 cm n. 147

Biography   

Mario Schifano was born in Homs, in Libya, on 20 September 1934.
Immediately after the war his family moved to Rome where, after soon dropping out of school, the young Schifano first worked as a shop assistant and then worked with his father, an archaeologist restorer at the Etruscan Museum in Valle Giulia. Meanwhile, he also started painting.

He made his debut within the informal area with canvases thick with matter and furrowed by insightful gestures, and also marked by some drips. With works like this he opened his first solo exhibition in 1959 at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome. It was however during the exhibition he held the following year with Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio and Uncini at the Galleria La Salita that the critics started taking an interest in his work.

Having abandoned an informal approach, his painting evolved radically within the space of a few years. He now started painting monochrome works – large sheets of paper glued onto the canvas and covered with a single, dripping colour on the surface. The painting became a “screen”: a point of departure, the space of an event refused in which, a few years later, numbers, letters and fragments of symbols of consumer civilisation, such as the Esso or Coca Cola logos would emerge.
In 1961 he was awarded the Premio Lissone for the “Young International Painting” section and he put on a solo exhibition at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome. The following year he went to the United States. He came into contact with Pop Art, was struck by the works of Dine and Kline and exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery of New York in the “New Realist” exhibition.

He returned to the States in late 1963, after putting on one-man shows in Rome, Paris and Milan, and he stayed there for the first half of the following year, when he was invited to the Biennale in Venice. This was the period of his anaemic landscapes, a series of canvases in which the natural world is suggested by distant memories of fragments, details and allusive scripts.
The artist now worked on thematic cycles, and towards the end of 1964 took an even greater interest in revisiting the history of art.

The following year this led him to his famous works dedicated to Futurism. Once again, it was an image from the mass media, one belonging to a collective memory, and one that was therefore worn out: it was the photographic image of the historic Futurist group in Paris, which prompted Schifano. He emphasized the emergence of this photograph from memory, reducing the figures to faceless shapes, and creating distance by veiling the portrait with coloured perspex panels.

Also in 1965, the year when he took part in the biennale exhibitions in San Marino and in Sao Paulo, he made Io sono infantile [I am Childish], a work linked to illustrations for children, which also represented an entirely mental return to a distant temporal dimension, and yet one that was always part of the artist. During this period, Schifano’s work aroused interest in watchful critics like M. Calvesi, M. Fagiolo and A. Boatto, as well as in illustrious writers such as A. Moravia and G. Parise.

In 1967 he presented the feature film entitled Anna Carini in agosto vista dalle farfalle, which was followed by a trilogy of films: Satellite, Umano non umano and Trapianto, consunzione e morte di Franco Brocani. Even so, his first work in the cinema had been back in 1964. In 1966 and 1967 he made the Ossigeno ossigeno, Oasi, and Compagni compagni series. The last of these is illustrative of Schifano’s special commitment in these troubled years which led him to such a crisis of ideology and identity that he declared he would abandon painting.

In the early 1970s he started transferring television images directly to primed canvas, isolating them from the narrative rhythm of the sequences they belonged to and offering them up with a touch of alienating nitro-paint colour. First of all that was the material collected in the United States during reconnoitring for Laboratorio umano, a film that was never made, that was subjected to reformulation, and then came the wealth of images that are broadcast daily by our television stations.

In 1971 he took part in “Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960-70”, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. He later put on solo exhibitions in Rome, Parma, Turin and Naples, and took part in the 10th Quadriennale in Rome and at the Contemporanea, an exhibition in the car park of Villa Borghese, also in Rome and again curated by Bonito Oliva.

In 1974 the University of Parma devoted a vast anthological exhibition to him with about 100 works illustrating the adventure of his entire painting career, highlighting the main currents. The event was played down by the critics. In this period the artist was less present on the arts scene, agitated by so many ideological and existential doubts which naturally also interfered with his creative abilities. And, surprisingly, this was the moment of his “d’après”, works of re-examination, in which Schifano took after Magritte, De Chirico, Boccioni, Picabia, and Cèzanne. And he also took after himself, repeating the paintings he had made in the Sixties.

In 1976 he took part in the “Europa / America, l’astrazione determinata 1960-76” exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. Two years later he was again invited to the Biennale in Venice and he presented Il capolavoro sconosciuto, a reworking of Balzac’s famous Hidden Masterpiece, at the Tartaruga in Rome. Towards the end of the decade, however, the artist once again found pleasure in painting and made his Al mare and Quadri equestri series.
A number of his works went on show in 1979 at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. In 1980 he was invited by Maurizio Calvesi to the “Arte e critica 1980” exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and the following year he was one of the very few artists selected by Germano Celant for “Identité italienne”, which went on show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In 1981 he also made the group of paintings that came together under the title Cosmesi, and these were followed by the Architettura, Biplano, and Orto botanico cycles. He was back at the Venice Biennale in 1982, and also in 1984, when he showed his Naturale Sconosciuto cycle, presented by Alain Cueff at the Palazzo delle Prigioni Vecchie also in Venice. A focus on what is natural became a constant feature of Schifano’s studies, as was clear in his subsequent exhibitions, such as the solo displays at the Tour Fromage and at the Galerie Maeght in Paris (1988).

In 1989, the year in which he took part in the “Italian Art in the 20th Century” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, one-man shows were held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Ferrara where, under the title “Inventario con anima e senz’anima”, he brought together a series of canvases showing his finest works in the field of naturalism. The Ferrara show became a travelling exhibition, going to a number of Italian cities and ending up in France, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Saint Priest (1992).

On the occasion of its reopening (1990), the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome put on a review of his works, entitled “Divulgare”, with a considerable number of large-format works made for the occasion. Three years later, he exhibited his Reperti cycle in a number of Italian galleries. Here he took up the theme of prehistoric animals, which had first appeared in his one-man show at the Maeght.

In 1994 he took part in “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968”, put on by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which moved the following year to the Triennale di Milano and to the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. In 1996 Schifano paid homage to his Musa Ausiliaria – in other words, to television as a constant flow of images able to take the form of the only true, all-embracing reality of our age.

The artist set up an Internet site through which he related to the world. While in the late Sixties he did no more than extrapolate individual shots from television programmes and project them out of context onto the canvas, he now intervened pictorially on the images, changing their sense even more. A great exhibition with about forty canvases of this type and a thousand photographs retouched by hand was hosted first by the Memorial da América Latina in Sao Paulo (1996), then at the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires (1997). In 1998 it went to the Centro Wilfredo Lam in Havana and to Mexico City. During a trip to Brazil he put on a happening in a favela in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1997, for the seventh centenary of the building of Santa Croce in Florence, Schifano won the Premio San Giorgio di Donatello for the polychrome stained-glass windows in the crypt of the basilica. That year he also created the scene designs for the carnival in Rome.
He died in Rome on 26 January 1998.