Mario Schifano, Inventario and the television image
Inventario belongs to one of the most distinctive phases of Mario Schifano’s artistic research, when, in the early 1970s, he increasingly turned his attention to photography, television and the continuous circulation of mass-media imagery.
During these years, Schifano began working with emulsified canvas, transferring photographic images onto the pictorial surface and subsequently altering them through enamel and colour. The resulting works occupy an intermediate territory between painting, photography and the moving image, transforming the television screen into a new source of visual experience.
The Inventario series is documented particularly around 1973–1974, with several works bearing this title executed in enamel on emulsified canvas. Comparable examples from the same period are recorded in galleries, exhibitions and auction archives.
Schifano’s interest in television was closely related to the celebrated Paesaggi TV works. In these compositions, images captured from television broadcasts were photographed, transferred onto canvas and transformed through painting. Plexiglas often reinforced the visual association with the reflective surface of a television screen.
Rather than reproducing reality directly, Schifano filtered it through contemporary media. Television became an intermediary between the external world and the artist, allowing him to isolate fragments of images and reconstruct them as autonomous pictorial events. This approach made his work particularly significant within the wider development of Italian art during the 1960s and 1970s.
The work offered by Egidi MadeinItaly measures 50 × 70 cm, is signed on the reverse and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Mario Schifano Archive. The reverse also bears the signature and stamp of Pop Art Gallery, Rome.
