Rotella, Mimmo

Rotella, Mimmo (1918– ). Italian painter and experimental artist, born at Catanzaro, Calabria. He studied at the Academy in Naples, then in 1951–2 at the University of Kansas on a Fulbright Scholarship. Since his return to Europe he has divided his time mainly between Rome and Paris. In 1954 he began exhibiting collages made up of fragments of posters torn from walls, calling them Manifesti lacerati, and he wrote: ‘Tearing posters down from the walls is the only recourse, the only protest against a society that has lost its taste for change and shocking transformations.’ The French affichistes worked in a similar manner, but Rotella seems to have arrived at the technique independently. In 1960 he became associated with Nouveau Réalisme in Paris and he was a pioneer of this kind of work in Italy.