Mimmo Rotella Manifesto at the GNAM in Rome

Heralded as the most comprehensive scholarly survey of the art of Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 - Milan, 2006), the exhibition"Mimmo Rotella Manifesto" will open on October 30, 2018 to the public at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, ending on February 10, 2019.

The retrospective, curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with Antonella Soldaini, was conceived on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth and sees the exhibition of more than one hundred and sixty works: these will make up six large poster-manifesto ensembles, each on one of the main techniques experimented by Rotella. The reworked advertising poster is always the starting point for these techniques. “The works featured in the six poster-manifesto ensembles testify to the different techniques adopted by Rotella over the years. This is a continuous linguistic shift that demonstrates the strong taste for experimentation typical of the artist’s personality. Looking synchronously at his excursus and being able to have for the first time a total overview of his work, one is able to grasp the logic underlying Rotella’s making. Like a slow-motion tracking shot, the chronological succession of the set-manifestos allows for a better understanding of the different phases the artist went through during his long career,” declares Antonella Soldaini.

According to the exhibition layout, the exhibition space becomes a vast indoor square surrounded by walls or building facades. Anurban interpretation that “solicited a display that is not composed of fragments, i.e., the paintings, but is integrated with the square.” Thus, the square will be wallpapered with six huge billboards (averaging 3 x 10 meters), so as to look like a city context.

There will be testimonies, documents, drawings, small paintings on canvas and on paper, photographs, catalogs, and letters that will follow one another in chronological order: from the Epistaltism Manifesto of 1949 to the 1975 Phonetic Poems record, from the confessions contained in the diaries of 1993-1994 to the awarding of the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in 2002.

Outside the Gallery’s hall-square will be two small squares, in which films from the 1950s and the Replicants series from 1990 will be exhibited: ten porcelain works that allude to a humanity reduced to replicating itself and with no more feelings.

The exhibition is part of the initiatives promoted by the Mimmo Rotella Foundation and the Mimmo Rotella Institute with the support of the Region of Calabria.

For info: www.lagallerianazionale.com

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: Full 10 euros, reduced 5 euros.

Image: “Mimmo Rotella Manifesto,” view of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome, 2018 (Ph.Credit Giorgio Benni)

Mimmo Rotella Manifesto at the GNAM in Rome

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