Milan, at the Giò Marconi gallery the enamels on canvas paper by Mario Schifano

From January 21 to March 20, 2020, the Gió Marconi Gallery in Milan opens its doors to the exhibition Mario Schifano. Something Else, which focuses on the enamels on canvas paper that Mario Schifano (Homs, 1934 - Rome, 1998) made from 1959 until 1962.

Painted after some informal experiences, the artist presented these monochromes for the first time in Rome, at La Salita gallery (1960), in the group show of five painters in which Giuseppe Uncini, Tano Festa, Francesco Lo Savio and Franco Angeli participated, and later, in a solo show at Tartaruga (1961). In advance of other protagonists of the Roman scene, Schifano intended with his monochromes not only to reset the surface of the painting to zero, even as a response to the informal, but to attribute another point of view to it, to “frame” it, to propose a new way of seeing and painting.

According to Maurizio Calvesi, as he wrote in the catalog of the exhibition at the Odyssia Gallery (1963), “they were highly original paintings: painted with a single hue or two, covering the entire rectangle of the surface or two rectangles juxtaposed... A number or letters (but only sometimes) isolated or symmetrically marked; some hump of the paper, some draining: the movement of painting was all there.”

The title of this exhibition refers to a 1960 work Schifano made when he was just 26 years old and to a 1962 polyptych that is among the works on display. With effective advertising-message conciseness Something Else is perhaps indicating that what the artist intended to paint had to be different from what was around; but it is also a programmatic intent expressed in two words: the monochrome, understood as a tabula rasa, is already ready to be transformed into a place of projection, a photographic field in which details, details, fractions of images will be brought into focus. Something else has an almost prophetic flavor when one considers that these “screens” will soon be filled with the new signs of modern life. It is in light of all this that the exhibition focuses on monochromes, sixty years after their birth, as a crucial stage in Mario Schifano’s creative journey and the genesis of his pictorial invention.

Completing the exhibition will be a nucleus of works on paper from the same years and, for the occasion, a tabloid-format journal of the exhibition will be published with unpublished content by the artist and a contribution by Riccardo Venturi and Alberto Salvadori.

For all information you can visit the official website of Gió Marconi Gallery.

Pictured: Mario Schifano in his studio in front of the work Qualcos’altro (Rome, 1962). Ph. credit: Mario Schifano Archive

Milan, at the Giò Marconi gallery the enamels on canvas paper by Mario Schifano

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