Mario Schifano (1934-1998) - "Il Gusto"

Mario Schifano, Il gusto. Lithographic offset reproduction (5 colors) of the original work by Mario Schifano "Il Gusto" expressly produced for Bolaffiarte. 5000 numbered copies bear the artist's autograph (our copy no. 792). Bolaffi blind stamp. In excellent condition. Rare to find associated with the magazine and still kept inside the official carton with which it was shipped in 1974. No reserve!

Mario Schifano (Homs, September 20, 1934 – Rome, January 26, 1998) was an Italian painter and filmmaker.

Together with Franco Angeli and Tano Festa, he represented a fundamental point of Italian and European Pop Art. Perfectly integrated into the international cultural scene of the sixties, he was regarded as a prolific, exuberant artist who loved social life. The habit of drugs that lasted throughout his life earned him the label of a doomed artist.[1]

A passionate student of new painting techniques, he was among the first to use computers to create works and managed to process images from the computer and transfer them onto emulsion canvases (the "computerized canvases").[2] The author's prolificity and the apparent simplicity of his works led to the diffusion of a large number of fakes, especially after his death.

Mario Schifano was born in Italian Libya, where his father of Sicilian origin worked as an employee of the Ministry of Public Instruction and collaborated with Renato Bartoccini.[3] After the war he returned to Rome where, due to his restless personality, he left school early, initially working as a shop assistant, then following in his father's footsteps who worked at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia as an archaeologist and restorer. Thanks to this experience he approached art, initially creating works that showed the influence of Informal Art. His first personal exhibition was at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome in 1959.[4]

Towards the end of the fifties he took part in the Piazza del Popolo School artistic movement with artists such as Francesco Lo Savio, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Uncini, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa and Franco Angeli. The group gathered at the Rosati Café, a Roman bar frequented at the time by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia and Federico Fellini and located at Piazza del Popolo, from which they took their name. In 1960 the group's works were shown, in a collective exhibition, at the La Salita Gallery.[5]

1961-1970: Art, Cinema and the Stars
In 1961 he won the Lissone Prize for the section "Young International Painting" and had a solo show at Galleria La Tartaruga of Plinio De Martiis in Rome.

Meanwhile, at the Rosati Café he met, among others, his future lover Anita Pallenberg, with whom he undertook his first trip to New York in 1962 where he came into contact with Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga, frequenting the Factory and the New American Cinema Group soirées. During this period he participated in the New Realists show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, a collective that included many young Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme artists, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.[1] He then had the opportunity to participate in New York's social life that led him to early experiments with LSD.[6]

Upon returning from New York, after participating in exhibitions in Rome, Paris and Milan, he took part in the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964.[5] In this period, his paintings defined as "Anemic landscapes", in which memory evokes the representation of nature with small details or allusive inscriptions and in embryo the revisitations of art history that later led him to the famous pictorial works on Futurism.[4] Also from the same year are his first films in 16 mm Round Trip and Reflex, which positioned him, as a central figure of Italian experimental cinema, on the fringe of that movement that soon would lead to the experience of the Independent Cinema Cooperative, to which he never openly adhered.[5] In Rome he met and frequented Marco Ferreri and Giuseppe Ungaretti, to whom, already eighty, he offered an evening at the Peyote.[6] But one of the acquaintances of this period that influenced him most was Ettore Rosboch, with whom he formed a deep friendship, based on a shared passion for music. In those years, also thanks to frequent trips to London, the two befriended the Rolling Stones, to whom they introduced Anita Pallenberg who in 1965 began a relationship with Brian Jones, later becoming the partner of Keith Richards.[6] In 1965 he participated in the San Marino and São Paulo Biennials and created his cycle of works entitled I am childish, awakening interest among others of Maurizio Calvesi, Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco and Goffredo Parise.[4]

In 1966-67, also thanks to the collaboration of Ettore Rosboch, he formed the band Le Stelle di Mario Schifano, thus initiating a close collaboration with musicians Giandomenico Crescentini, former bassist of New Dada, the Roman guitarist Urbano Orlandi, keyboardist Nello Marini and drummer Alessandrino Sergio Cerra, of whom he managed the musical direction and the concerts’ staging, turning them for a couple of years into one of the highest examples of Italian and international psychedelic music.[7] Mario Schifano left the group to itself after the Roman event Grande angolo, sogni e stelle held on December 28 at the Piper Club,[8] devoting himself more actively to his film and artistic activity, and being drawn into a temporary relationship with Marianne Faithfull, which was widely discussed in the British scandal press.[6][9] The stage’s visual setup for Grande angolo, sogni e stelle also provided for projecting images onto the musicians, using four projectors, of images on Vietnam, nature imagery and the feature film Anna Carini seen in August by the butterflies[6] previously presented at Studio Marconi.[4]

In 1967 he produced the opening and closing titles sequences for Marco Ferreri's film L'harem. It was precisely thanks to Ferreri’s interest in his work that the following year he managed to produce his Trilogia per un massacro, consisting of the three feature films Satellite (1968), Umano non umano (1969), in which Adriano Aprà, Carmelo Bene, Mick Jagger, Alberto Moravia, Sandro Penna, Rada Rassimov and Keith Richards collaborated, and Trapianto, consunzione, morte di Franco Brocani (1969).[5]

In 1968 he designed the cover of Stereoequipe for Equipe 84. In 1969 the apartment located in Piazza in Piscinula in Rome, then owned by Schifano, was used by Ferreri as a set for the film Dillinger è morto, on whose walls some of the artist's paintings are visible.[10][11] In 1969 the Rolling Stones dedicated to Mario Schifano the song Monkey Man.[6]

Seventies and eighties
In 1971 some of his paintings were included by Achille Bonito Oliva in the exhibition Vitalità nel negativo nell'arte italiana 1960/70.[4] Furthermore his friendship with the president of the Monza Biennale, Oscar Cugola, brought him very close to television circles. Many of his works, the so-called "monochromes", feature only one or two colors, applied to wrapping paper glued to canvas. The influence of Jasper Johns appears in the use of isolated numbers or letters from the alphabet, but in Schifano's painting manner one can trace analogies with Robert Rauschenberg's work. In a 1960 painting the word "no" is written with color drips in large uppercase letters, like in a wall graffiti.

The influence of Pop Art is evident throughout Mario Schifano's artistic production, fascinated by new technologies, advertising, music, photography and experimentation. In particular, the works closest to the artist's pop art are those from the Eighties. Among the most important works of this period are the Propagandas, a series dedicated to advertising brands (Coca-Cola and Esso) in which there is a clear example of conveying images of everyday use and easily recognizable cited in multiple ways or details of them, to bicycles, flowers and nature in general (among the most famous series are the Anemic Landscapes, Interrupted Views, The Tree of Life, Extinct and the Fields of Wheat). They can certainly be counted among the most recognizable and important works the emulsion canvases, offspring of his constant photographic bursts that accompany his whole life, supports on which are re-proposed television images of everyday consumer, multiple and in a continuous flow with light painting interventions. There are in his production also canvases where through screen printing technique images of some of his most important works are reproduced (Esso, Compagni compagni, Landscapes), which, however, are not to be understood as proper "screen prints", but as unique works created with that technique. Schifano in those years had almost abandoned painting as a technique as he himself claimed that it was dead and had become obsolete compared to the use of different techniques (for example emulsions or screen prints). In reality he would never abandon it, despite the pictorial reality of those years suggesting otherwise, allowing him to become always a curious precursor of the use of technology for artistic production. By affinity with the cultural trends mentioned above, in the eighties he came into contact with the creative group (illustrators, writers, cartoonists, reporters) of the magazine Frigidaire (Stefano Tamburini, Vincenzo Sparagna, Andrea Pazienza, Tanino Liberatore, Massimo Mattioli, Filippo Scozzari).

In 1984 he created the Cycle of Nature, composed of ten large canvases donated to the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Gibellina, in the province of Trapani.

Nineties
The last production period is particularly marked by media and multimedia, interrupted only by some more painterly cycles[12]. On March 27, 1997 the artist, who in the eighties had served sentences for possession of narcotics, obtained from the Criminal Appellate Court of Rome full judicial reintegration since "the drugs were only for personal use" thanks to the defense of his lawyer Attilio Maccarrone.[13] He died at 63, while in the intensive care unit of the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome, due to a heart attack.[14]

Legacy
The Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (CSAC) of Parma preserves two fonds dedicated to Mario Schifano. The first[16] includes 13 canvas works. The second[17] consists of 132 Polaroids and 244 black-and-white photographs on silver-toned paper, taken in the United States during the production of the film Human Lab, as well as a series of 47 black-and-white photographs by various authors (predominantly anonymous): portraits of Mario Schifano at work, at home, with other artists or intellectuals. Both fonds are public and fully accessible.

In 2008, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Schifano's death, the CSAC organized America Anemica, a survey of the artist's entire donation curated by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle."