Frieze Masters London – Cardi Gallery

For FRIEZE MASTERS Viewing Room 2020, Cardi Gallery is proud to present a selection of works produced between 1956 and 1979 by the visionary Italian artist Mimmo Rotella (1918 – 2006), referencing the major retrospective MIMMO ROTELLA. Beyond Décollage: Photo emulsions and artypos, 1963 – 1980, on view at Cardi Gallery London through December 2020.

Arguably a pioneer of the Italian Pop Art movement, Rotella developed a number of techniques that would chronicle his time and marry the power of iconic film and popular imagery to the history of painting. Through the novel media of the dècollage he created in 1953, and later the photo emulsion (from 1963) and artypo (from 1965), the artist appropriated images of cultural icons veering from the playful and colourful to the historic and traumatic. He was amongst the first artists ever to use a mechanical – photographic or typographic – reproduction process to print a kaleidoscope of iconic images onto traditional materials associated with conventional art, such as canvas and paper. The Viewing Room includes great examples of works across these three media.

While Rotella’s practice became associated to the Mec-Art movement, it developed in parallel to that of masters of American Pop Art, who included his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, several of whom became friends he exhibited works with. The artist took part in the seminal 1964 Venice Biennale, where he presented a series of influential Décollages – progenitors of Italian Pop art. Although Pop is often seen as an American art form, and Rauschenberg famously won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964 (the first American to do so) it is noteworthy that artists on both sides of the Atlantic were incorporating mass media popular imagery into their work.