Mimmo Rotella: The Urban Poet

To label or categorise Mimmo Rotella in stringent notional parameters or within a defined field of action would be a difficult task. Being much more than an artist of a movement, Rotella disrupted the history of art in the second half of the twentieth century with his ground- breaking approach to working with his medium. From the very beginning of his practice in the 1940s, Rotella was able to appropriate new media and technical-stylistic innovations from decade to decade, which he was constantly advancing in an artistic crusade completely unbound by the captivity of a definition or label.

Although he joined Nouveau Réalisme around 1961 and became the only Italian to join the movement of French critic Pierre Restany (1930 – 2003), he went down in history as an extremely multifaceted artist capable of diverse artistic experimentation. Rotella’s practice inspired some to even speak of "Italian Pop" or think of him as a direct heir to the Duchampian matrix when referencing his work. Interestingly, it was Restany who found himself in the uncomfortable position of defining Rotella during the peak of their close friendship in the 1990s. Restany referred to Rotella as half a century of urban culture, alluding to the intervention that the artist was able to make vis-à-vis towards his own time, bringing an international outlook to the Italian art scene.