ROME — Starting Tuesday, the exhibition “Laboratory Schifano” will open at the MACRO museum, realized in collaboration with the International Film Festival in Rome. In “Laboratory Schifano” will be presented for the first time over two thousand pictures taken by Mario Schifano, displayed in a setting aimed at involving the public in the artist’s creative flow. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the collaboration between the Archives of Mario Schifano and the Museum MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art, Via Reggio Emilia 54, Rome. http://www.macro.roma.museum/ ).

Mario Schifano was born in Homs, in Libya, on September 20, 1934. Immediately after World War II, his family moved to Rome where, after soon dropping out of school, the young Schifano first worked as a shop assistant and then worked with his father, an archaeologist restorer at the Etruscan Museum in Valle Giulia. Meanwhile, he also started painting. He made his debut within the informal area with canvases thick with matter and furrowed by insightful gestures, and also marked by some drips. With works like this he opened his first solo exhibition in 1959 at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome. It was however during the exhibition he held the following year with Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio and Uncini at the Galleria La Salita that the critics started taking an interest in his work. Having abandoned an informal approach, his painting evolved radically within the space of a few years. The painting became a “screen”: a point of departure, the space of an event refused in which, a few years later, numbers, letters and fragments of symbols of consumer civilisation, such as the Esso or Coca Cola logos would emerge. In 1994 he took part in “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968”, put on by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which moved the following year to the Triennale di Milano and to the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

The exhibition that will open on Tuesday is by Massimo Barbero, Francesca Pola and the Archives Mario Schifano and is an amazing dive in the heart of the creativity of Mario Schifano, one of the most innovative international art scene of the second half of the twentieth century.

About The Author

Blast correspondent Luna Moltedo is an Italian art expert and journalist based in Rome

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