Mimmo Rotella

This is the first anthological monograph of Mimmo Rotella, one of the most innovative Italian artists of the 20th century alongside Fontana, Manzoni, Burri, and De Chirico. The volume spans his 60-year career in over 350 works from the late 1940s to the present. The artistic fortune of Mimmo Rotella seems to be marked by a constant play of chance and by a canny intuition - by that mythical mental radar to which the artist often alludes in his writings. Rotella’s star - the lucky star - is a splendid one which has accompanied him for eighty years and which as in an intergalactic journey has permitted him to visit new worlds , to carry out new experiences characterized by a sort of fatal attraction for the unusual, the unexplored and the unforeseen. Germano Celant traces Rotella’s work, in all of its diversified phases and periods from 1946 up until today, from the initial geometrical and pro-decollages works (1946-1950) to the decollages and the verso of the affiches (1954-1964), the artypo and emulsified canvases (1963-1973), the blanks (1980-1982) and the overpaintings (1986-1999). Mimmo Rotella (b. 1918 Catanzaro) has been the subject of numerous retrospectives throughout Europe and the United States. In 1964, Rotella represented Italy in the Venice Biennale. His work is included in prominent public collections including the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris Museum Ludwig, Koln, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hara Museum in Tokyo, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He lives in Milan and Nice.