Viva America, 1963, Décollage on canvas, 33 1/2 x 35 1/4 inches
Private collection, courtesy Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan

Knoedler & Company is pleased to announce our representation of Mimmo Rotella (1918–2006) with the gallery’s first exhibition of his work, presented in association with Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan. This will also be the first solo exhibition of Rotella’s work in New York since 2000. Twenty-one works will be exhibited, spanning more than three decades, from 1954 to 1990, and including examples of: the artist’s early, abstract retro d’affiches (collaged backs of found posters); his artypos (“art + typography,” in which Rotella appropriated galley proofs of posters taken from commercial print shops); his Mec Art (“mechanical art”) photoreportages (in which enlarged negatives made from magazines and newspapers are projected directly onto canvas treated with photographic emulsion); the sovrapitture (in which the fronts of posters are overpainted in acrylic, with graffiti-like markings); and finally the décollages (literally, the ungluing of paper), the process for which Rotella is considered an early innovator, and for which he is perhaps best known. In his décollages, Rotella would tear, or “lacerate” posters from public walls, glue them to canvas, and then tear them again, to create—in the earliest examples—highly abstract gestural compositions. As Meredith Malone writes,

The surface of the torn poster (be it recto or verso) proved to be a site of rich discovery for the artist as it supplied him with a seemingly endless store of imagery, at first abstract and then increasingly related to mass consumerism and the cinema.

Following a trajectory that paralleled that of American Pop art, Rotella—who in 1960 joined the Paris-based Nouveaux Réalistes, brought together by Pierre Restany—gradually grew more focused on the appropriated imagery in his “lacerations,” and also came to recognize the act of appropriation as a form of protest. As he stated, to tear the posters off the wall is the unique compensation for a society that has lost its taste for change and for fabulous transformations. From the early 1960s on, a fascination with American popular culture emerged as a recurrent theme in his work. Knoedler’s exhibition includes images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Andy Warhol, and the Statue of Liberty, among other American icons.

Passeggiata Ripetta, 1958, retro d’affiche on panel, 26 3/8 x 32 3/8 inches
Private collection, courtesy Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, Milan

Mimmo Rotella: American Icons and Early Work opens to the public on Thursday, April 30th, from 6 to 8 pm, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Meredith Malone. Knoedler is open Tuesday to Friday, 9:30 am to 5:30 pm and Saturday 10 am to 5:30 pm; after Memorial Day the gallery will be on summer hours, Monday to Friday, 9:30 am to 5:00 pm.

About the author: Meredith Malone received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where she wrote her dissertation on Nouveau Réalisme. She is Assistant Curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. A specialist in modern and contemporary art, she has curated and co-curated several exhibitions, including Andrea Fraser, “What do I, as an artist, provide?” (2007), Thaddeus Strode: Absolutes and Nothings (2008), and Power Fields: Explorations in the Work of Vito Acconci (2008). Malone has contributed scholarly essays to several exhibition catalogues in the U.S. and abroad and is currently curating Chance Aesthetics, an exhibition that examines chance as a key compositional principle of modernism.

Next exhibition: Conrad Marca-Relli. Knoedler will announce our U.S. representation of Marca-Relli with our first exhibition of his work, to open in September, presented in association with Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma.

For additional information or images, please contact press@knoedlergallery.com; or Melissa De Medeiros, 212-794-0564.