What is Mimmo Rotella’s technique? 

In 1951, Rotella exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

Between 1951 and 1952, he went to the United States on a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation, where he met Robert  Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, and Yves Klein. 

After a visit from the art critic Pierre Restany in Rome in 1958, he joined the Nouveau Réalisme movement.

In May 1961, he showed at the Parisian exhibition A’ 40°au-dessus de Dada curated by the art critic Restany who defined the movement at the Galerie J in Paris, opened on the occasion.

Other artists participating along with Mimmo Rotella included Arman, César, Dufrêne, Hains, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and Villeglé.

According to Plinio De Martiis, Mimmo Rotella’s décollages, which he started making 1953, prove that it was Italian art, not American, that first grasped the usefulness of mass media images in art. 

Since the 1950s, Rotella had adopted advertising posters as his artistic expression.

He started by tearing posters off of city walls and gluing the fragments on a canvas to then present either entire poster detached from the board and then ripped, or present its back, which were almost monochrome works. 

Calvesi wrote in 1967,

When grouping certain names, we cannot but think of others too, such as the ‘precedent‘ of Mimmo Rotella.”

Like De Martiis, he believed that the work of the young Roman artists of La Tartaruga

“was not a translation of American Pop Art, but related to a tradition, and even more a condition, that was authentically Italian.”

Seridécollage” is an offshoot of screen printing and collage.

This was a defining part of Rotella’s work. It involves superimposing two screen-prints and making tears by hand on them.