Mimmo Rotella Heros

Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 – Milan, 2006)

He moved to Rome in 1945 and frequented the young avant-garde formed by the exponents of Gruppo Forma 1 (Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato).
In 1950 he exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.
In February 1951 he participated in the exhibition “Abstract and Concrete Art in Italy – 1951” organized by Palma Bucarelli and Giulio Carlo Argan at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.
In 1953 he realizes that the medium of painting is no longer suitable for the expression of his poetics and suddenly has what he calls a “Zen enlightenment”: the discovery of the advertising poster as an artistic expression.

Mimmo Rotella’s décollage

Thus décollage was born: Rotella took pieces of posters torn off the street from the walls of Rome and pasted them on canvas, then reworked them in the studio, adopting the collage of the Cubists and contaminating it with elements borrowed from an informal matrix close to Hans Arp and Jean Fautrier and with the Dadaist ready-made.

Also in 1955, Carlo Cardazzo organized an exhibition entirely devoted to décollage and retro d’affiches at his Galleria del Naviglio in Milan.