Biography on display | Palazzo Esposizioni, Rome

Imagine an artist who, instead of seeking a definitive style, transforms his entire life into a series of changes of skin, materials, and obsessions: Mario Schifano was this, and much more. He was not born in Rome, but in Libya, amidst the sands and archaeological excavations. He was the son of a restorer and a mother who returned to Italy with her children during the war, passing through refugee camps and temporary accommodations in Cinecittà. As a boy, he left school, worked in a pastry shop in Trastevere, and was then hired at the Etruscan Museum as a drawing polisher. And here the first label is already discarded: instead of the classic academic path, Schifano grows up among dust, materials, dirty hands, and dreams of painting that make him seem "serious, polite, but intolerant of discipline," as his superiors write about him. The idea that changes everything is this: Schifano's true biography is not the dates, but the continuous leaps from one language to another, the ability to experience every crisis in art as an opportunity to invent a new one. The idea of an artist faithful to a single form does not belong to him: Schifano anticipates the crises of the image, abandons and resumes painting, uses cinema, photography, emulsions, perspex, computers, and refuses to be just a painter when everyone wants him to be the king of the monochrome. You can see this already in the early 1950s, when he began exhibiting while still working at the museum. In 1959, he exhibited at the Galleria Appia Antica with Emilio Villa, who praised him for his "authentic frenzy." In his tiny studio on a Roman terrace, he experimented with concrete and iron, creating paintings that looked like sculptures and vice versa. In 1960, with the exhibition “5 pittori. Roma 60”, he established himself with a generation that rejected figuration and transformed the painting into an absolute object. Then, suddenly, the monochromes: canvases covered with black or white enamel, numbers and letters stamped as if they were packaging, folds and creases left by paper glued to the canvas. Giorgio Franchetti, a visionary collector, calls them "voluptuous." But Schifano didn't stop there: in 1961, he signed a contract with gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, resigned from the Etruscan Museum, and began projecting the Coca-Cola and Cities Service brands onto canvas, anticipating Italian Pop Art but never copying it from the American version. There is an episode that explains everything: in 1963, instead of flying to Paris for his solo exhibition at Sonnabend, he stayed in Rome and inaugurated “Schifano. Tutto”, where he transformed urban landscapes, road accidents, and advertisements into paintings that are reportages of manipulated reality. During that time, he dined with Marcel Duchamp and met Guttuso; he left for New York with Anita Pallenberg, after receiving Balla's catalog from Calvesi. In the 1960s, he lived on Broadway, became friends with Frank O'Hara of MoMA, made short films, and exhibited futuristic trees and landscapes. In Rome, he experimented with diptychs and triptychs, traced objects, and transformed a window and a ficus plant into the protagonists of his canvases. He changed materials, mixed spray paint, shapes, and colored perspex sheets, inspired by a word he found on a Bob Dylan record: "revisited." Each crisis forced him to change again: in 1966, he wanted to stop painting and threw himself into cinema and photography. His films, often lost, are happenings in which reality becomes a flow of images, as in the evening at the Piper Club where music, short films, slides, and western films blend without boundaries. In the 1970s, he financed radical left-wing groups, dedicated himself to canvases emulsified with photographs, participated in major art and photography exhibitions, and held retrospectives featuring hundreds of works. He lived in apartments full of televisions that were always on, six cameras, and eight recorders: reality is never still; it is an archive in motion. In the 1980s and 1990s, while his figure is historicized, Schifano continues to leap: he uses computers, prints on PVC, and addresses issues such as the crisis in the Middle East and the climate emergency. He designed the pink jersey of the Giro d'Italia, the yellow jersey of the Tour de France, and the G7 poster. He traveled to Brazil and repainted a house in the Rio favela to defy the rules imposed by the authorities. And when asked why he isn't satisfied with just one style, he answers with facts: each season is an invention that overturns the previous one, each material a way to push the limits of painting and vision. The perspective that is often missing when it comes to Schifano is this: his restlessness is not a flaw, but his true consistency. Where other artists seek a unique style to repeat endlessly, he self-sabotages, changes course, and burns the bridges behind him. He has been described as "human-non-human," always poised between presence and distance, between painting and cinema, between work and what is outside the frame. The phrase that sums it all up? “He gave painting the power to play with the inconsistency of the moment and took away from cinema the illusion of being able to photograph time.” If this explosion of constant changes has changed the way you think about art, you can declare it on Lara Notes with I'm In: it's not just interest, it's admitting that this restlessness concerns you. And if in a few days you find yourself telling someone that Schifano lived surrounded by eight televisions that were always on, on Lara Notes you can tag whoever was with you with Shared Offline: it's the way to record that the conversation really mattered. This Note was created thanks to the work of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and saves you 25 minutes compared to reading the full text.