Mimmo Rotella: Erotique on display in Milan

Ten years after Mimmo Rotella's death, many Italian galleries decided to pay tribute to the renowned artist through a round of expositions "Mimmo Rotella 2016" which will involve Fondazione Marconi, Cardi Gallery, Robilant + Voena and Galleria Carla Sozzani. The latter will hold the exhibition Erotique, starting from tomorrow October 8.

A pivotal figure within Italian art scene and real innovator, Mimmo Rotella reached the peak of his career in the '50s, when he developed a brand new art form which he called décollage. For this technique, he drew inspiration from ripped posters he used to spot around the streets of Rome, where he was living at the time. On a constant search for new ideas to help him out of the artistic crisis he was going through, Rotella began to bring home these posters and, by tearing them even more up and overlapping them, he gave birth to some of his most famous and appreciated artworks, as well as to a great artistic innovation.

A 'nomadic' soul, Rotella travelled a lot in his career, from Paris to New York, passing for the French Riviera, where was hugely inspired by the international atmosphere and the mundane life. Then 1968 came, and a revolutionary wave took Italian artistic and cultural scene by storm, demolishing the dictates of bourgeois morality and theorising the 'sexual liberation'. It was in these years that Rotella started to deal with this theme, now the red thread of the exhibition to be held at the Galleria Carla Sozzani. There will be, in fact, some of the artist's most important works, characterised by a strong allusive connotation, as La Dolce Conquista (1972), L’amplesso (1975), e Other scenes (1968) ed Erotique (1971).

The exhibition Mimmo Rotella: Erotique will be held at the Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan, October 8 to November 13, 2016.