1934 -1958

Mario Schifano is born on 20 September 1934 in Homs, Libya, where his father, Giuseppe Schifano, works as a restorer
at archaeological dig sites.
In 1941, in the midst of the war, his mother, Rosa Paganini, returns to Italy with her children Mario, Francesco and Ada. The family spends time in refugee camps in various cities before arriving in Rome, where they are temporarily housed at Cinecittà studios, and then in the La Marmora Barracks
in Trastevere. After being interned in an American prison camp, Giuseppe also reaches Rome, joining the staff of the National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia, and the family
is assigned a house at 30 Via Spartaco.

Young Mario leaves school without obtaining any secondary school qualifications and works as an errand boy at the Valzani pastry shop in Trastevere. In 1951, he is hired as a temporary employee (later becoming permanent) at the National Etruscan Museum, where he is assigned various duties, including as a restorer and polisher of drawings. One of the reports drawn up annually by his superiors states that he is “serious, polite and respectful, although sometimes impatient with the discipline of the work because of his aspirations as a painter.”

Between 1956 and 1957, he completes his compulsory military service.

From the mid-1950s onwards, he is involved in several group exhibitions (as mentioned in the leave authorizations granted by the Museum).
His first documented exhibitions date to 1958: the Tuscolano Painting Prize, the Cinecittà Prize, organized by the Italian Communist Party, and the ‘Prima Rassegna di Arti Figurative di Roma e del Lazio’, held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where he exhibits three works – Paesaggio, Muri and Figure su fondo verde.

He meets Giuseppe Uncini, Tano Festa, Francesco Lo Savio, Franco Angeli and Cesare Tacchi, his friends and companions for a significant part of his life.

1959 - 1960

1959 is a crucial and productive year, with new developments coming thick and fast. Emilio Villa, mentor of the Galleria Appia Antica, poet, translator, scholar of ancient languages, art critic, curator and publisher, takes an interest in Schifano’s work. Villa is an eccentric but absolutely central figure in the Roman art community.

In January, the collective exhibition Mambor, Schifano, Tacchi opens at the Galleria Appia Antica, with Schifano exhibiting a group of abstract canvases based on clusters of mainly black strokes on a light background, enlivened here and there by “a splash of red or yellow.”

On 23 May, the artist’s first solo exhibition opens, again at the Galleria Appia Antica. Once again, he presents a fairly uniform group of works. These are large canvases in which he radicalizes the austere, Franciscan range of earth tones and experiments with new materials, such as plaster, sand and cement mixed with PVA glue. In the exhibition catalogue, Villa describes the young artist’s “outbursts”, “amazement”, “delving into the world of motion”, “fleeting avalanches”, “murky, hybrid, heavy techniques” and “authentic frenzy”: this is his definitive moment of recognition.

In autumn, in his first studio, a room on the communal terrace at 47 Piazza Scanderbeg, Schifano creates the Cementi series. These are textured paintings featuring a central element – hollowed out, spherical or square – capable of defining an otherwise shapeless field.
The central element is expanded in subsequent works consisting of an overlapping use of iron and concrete, as in Cemento ferro 6 from 1960, where the metal plate is essentially a painting within a painting.

The artist’s first monochrome paintings date to 1960. In Uncini’s recollection, the first is a small canvas on which Schifano spreads black enamel, leaving some parts slightly uncovered, “a fairly slapdash painting, very casual, almost defiant.”

Some monochromes are painted on protruding canvases obtained by stretching the frame, sometimes two frames placed side by side. The colour is Ripolin enamel paint, applied to paper (sketched sheets, printed posters, newspapers or parcel paper) glued onto the canvas, which forms folds and creases as it adheres. Many of the monochromes have a number, an inscription or a letter stamped on them, in the centre or slightly above, using the stencils used to mark the packaging. The painting is rich, completely uniform and luminous. Giorgio Franchetti, a leading figure in the world of art collecting in Rome and elsewhere, describes them as “voluptuous”.

The new paintings make their appearance at the famous collective exhibition 5 pittori. Roma 60. Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio, Schifano, Uncini at the Galleria La Salita in Rome in November 1960. The exhibition marks a change of direction: a new generation of artists comes to the fore, eliminating all forms of figuration (even abstract or informel) and assigning the task of defining the image to the painting, in its objective reality, and to colour, pure and absolute.

Galleria Appia Antica

The gallery – established in a suburban farmhouse among the ruins of the Via Appia – opens in September 1957, based on an idea by painter Enrico Cervelli and put into practice by Liana Sisti, who join forces with Gabriella Travaglio Galdieri in 1958. From the outset, the intention is to give visibility to young artists – paying particular attention to non-Italians – through the support of Topazia Alliata, a Sicilian noblewoman, former painter and future director of the Galleria Trastevere. Crucial assistance is provided by Emilio Villa, the charismatic critic and poet originally from Lombardy, who brings together in the gallery the artists gravitating within his orbit: he stages the first Roman exhibition by Piero Manzoni, Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani, and exhibits the works of new talents he has identified, including Franco Angeli, Renato Mambor, Cesare Tacchi, Francesco Lo Savio, Mario Schifano and Giuseppe Uncini. The gallery is closely linked to the magazine Appia Antica. Atlante di arte nuova, two issues of which are published between 1959 and 1960. The gallery ceases operation at the end of 1959.

1961 - 1962

1961 marks the beginning of a lengthy period of relentless fame.
Schifano moves into a studio flat at 25 Passeggiata di Ripetta.
He wins the Lissone Prize, at the time one of the most prestigious art awards in Italy.
In March, he exhibits at the Galleria La Tartaruga (the exhibition is a huge success and everything is sold). In addition to monochromes, he presents canvases featuring the first appearance of the big “O”. Plinio De Martiis, photographer and founder – with his wife Ninnì Pirandello – of Galleria La Tartaruga, designs the invitation card for the exhibition (as is his custom), placing side by side two squares that resemble the contact sheets from his Rolleiflex camera. In the gallery, interest in photography among the artists is growing, with Schifano being the most radical exponent.

It is perhaps in 1961 that he writes half a page about what painting means to him: a rare moment for the artist, who does not like to talk about his work, preserved by Maurizio Calvesi.

Through Plinio De Martiis, Schifano meets Ileana Sonnabend, formerly the wife of American gallery owner Leo Castelli, who is initially interested in collaborating with La Tartaruga but then decides to open a gallery in Paris. In 1962, he signs an exclusive contract with the gallery owner and her new husband, Michael Sonnabend (sources mention a figure of 300,000 lire per month).

On 18 January 1962, Schifano resigns from his position at the National Etruscan Museum.

He experiments with new images in which his previous interest in symmetry and in marking the centre is subverted. Rectangular shapes with rounded corners fragment the monochrome surfaces with an eccentric cut and, in some cases, as in Elemento per grande paesaggio, with an image that appears severed, incomplete, unfinished.

Schifano is interested in what can be seen outside the galleries: the urban landscape. New paintings quickly appear over the course of the year, in which he incorporates elements derived from the advertisements that are adding colour to the face of the city: the Coca-Cola and the American petrol company Cities Service Company logos. He is experimenting with a work process that he will then adopt for a long period: he projects the photo of the brand’s logo onto the canvas and traces the outlines with a pencil, then with paint. The logos are never depicted in their entirety, the paintings only feature sections, details. The image is often framed by rounded corners, which commentators associate with the frame of a slide.

In November 1962, the work Propaganda, bearing the Coca-Cola logo, is exhibited at ‘The New Realists’ exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, curated by Pierre Restany, alongside works by some of the leading figures from the American pop art movement.

1963

On 25 April, Schifano skips the opening of his solo exhibition at the gallery in Paris run by Ileana Sonnabend, with whom he breaks all ties.

On the same days, 24 April, an exhibition with the significant title Schifano. Tutto opens in Rome at the Galleria Odyssia, owned by Federico Quadrani and Odyssia Skouras.
This ushers in a new, vibrant period. Schifano expands the sweep of his gaze to take in his surroundings. His new subjects are primarily landscapes, but also road accidents and other images taken from periodicals of the time. In these paintings too, the scene is often framed by a rounded corner, which is usually asymmetrical in relation to the perimeter of the work, where the parcel paper covering the canvas is visible. This passepartout is positioned between the actual perimeter and the painted one, emphasizing the discrepancy between the image and the painting. The catalogue is accompanied by an introduction by Maurizio Calvesi, who defines Schifano’s painting as “a great reportage”.

In May 1963, during a dinner with Marcel Duchamp after the opening of Gianfranco Baruchello’s solo exhibition at La Tartaruga in Rome, Schifano meets Renato Guttuso. The artist, a renowned painter committed to social causes and a leading exponent of realism in Italy, is interested in the work of young people, especially those working in the figurative arts.

On 13 December, Maurizio Calvesi and Augusta Monferini accompany Mario Schifano and his partner, Anita Pallenberg, to Naples, where they board the Cristoforo Colombo, bound for New York. Before departure, Calvesi gives Schifano the catalogue of Giacomo Balla’s exhibition, which has recently ended at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin.

Giovane Scuola di Roma

A new generation of Roman artists has emerged. Cesare Vivaldi, poet and militant critic, christens it the Giovane Scuola di Roma (Young School of Rome), in reference to the School of Rome, the well-known group of Roman painters active between the wars. In a famous article from 1963, writing about Franco Angeli, Umberto Bignardi, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Jannis Kounellis, Sergio Lombardo, Renato Mambor, Mario Schifano and Cesare Tacchi, he identifies their lowest common denominator as the mediated yet aggressive and biting way in which they turn their gaze towards visible reality. This is an objective and at the same time anti-naturalistic view, filtered through the most apparently cold and impassive of optical instruments, the camera lens.

The new artists, whose work Italian critics strive to distinguish from that of American pop art, are also the leading figures in a joyous, mythical period. This is a Rome teeming with artists and a favoured destination for foreign intellectuals. Heralded by La dolce vita (Federico Fellini’s film released in 1960) and supported by the advent of the so-called economic boom, it is the city of encounters, friendships, places dedicated to art – Piazza del Popolo and the galleries that surround it – cinema, music and literature.

1964

Schifano remains in New York until late spring.
He lives and works in a studio flat at 791 Broadway, in the Greenwich Village, in a space with large windows and mirrors that was once a dance school. Frank O’Hara, poet and curator of the Museum of Modern Art, lives in the same building. They become friends and make plans to write a book together: Words & Drawings. This work will never be printed, but the written and drawn pages remain.

Mario Schifano in New York in the 1960s was an explosion of vitality and youthfulness, not only because of his artistic qualities, but also because of his human ones. Tireless, extremely quick, agile, capable of adapting while remaining completely himself in a society that was entirely new to him, but which he knew how to handle with extreme familiarity, as if it were merely a change of neighbourhood rather than a change of continent.

Furio Colombo

He makes his first short film, Reflex, shot in 16 millimetre in Manhattan, in the studio of fashion photographer Bob Richardson.

He paints pictures that resemble drawings, featuring trees, sections of landscapes or figures in motion in the style of the futurist Balla. In April, he exhibits these pieces at the Odyssia Gallery in New York. The other works presented on that occasion include the large oak tree Senza titolo (Beebe’s Tree).

He returns to Italy in time to attend the opening of the Biennale, where he exhibits at the invitation of Maurizio Calvesi.

He moves into 52 Vicolo delle Grotte, in a house-studio which has windows overlooking Campo de’ Fiori.

An unprecedented combinatory approach appears in the paintings created during his stay in the United States and shortly after his return, as in the diptych Ultimo autunno and the triptych Corpo in moto e in equilibrio.
Photographer Ugo Mulas, who is able to translate poetics and work processes in his shots, photographs Schifano in his Roman studio experimenting with different combinations, leafing through the pages and rearranging the canvases that make up his diptychs and triptychs.

In November, Schifano exhibits his new works at the Galleria Odyssia in Rome. The catalogue introduction is by Nanni Balestrini, a leading figure in Gruppo 63, the “novissimi” poets with whom the art of some young Roman artists, particularly Schifano, is associated through ideas of discontinuity, asyntacticism and the decomposition of signs.

In these new works, the “whole” previously fragmented into a series of different canvases is now contained within a single image, diptychs or triptychs on which different elements are accumulated or superimposed, painted or drawn using the usual projection system or through the use of templates. Some are derived from landscapes familiar to the artist, such as the window of his studio in Vicolo delle Grotte and the ficus plant he keeps near that window, which appear in Suicidio n. 1 (1965).
Other images are cultural grafts, such as the palettes or colour charts of American painting, profiles of Brancusi’s sculptures, metaphysical squares, or they are tracings of tools, such as a wooden metre stick or perforated metal plates.
The recurring figures, for which a source has not been identified, include the branches of a tree without leaves, a bow motif, an embryonic shape.

1965

Schifano returns to the United States and visits Mexico with Tano Festa. During the trip, he shoots his second short film, Round Trip (part of the footage may date back to his previous stay in New York). When filming, he frequently rotates the camera axis by 90 degrees, sometimes turning the shots upside down. The switched-on television screen enters the images for the first time.

In November, he exhibits at the Galleria Odyssia in Rome and at Studio Marconi in Milan, where he shows Suicidio n. 1 and his first so-called Paesaggi anemici. In the catalogue, which covers both exhibitions, writer and friend Goffredo Parise paints his most famous portrait:

So, Schifano is a thirty-year-old man, roughly Mediterranean in appearance, if not Arab. At rest, his body, approximately one metre seventy tall and weighing fifty-six kilograms, viewed from different angles and distances, reveals above all a feline languor, innocent and astonished. Like a small puma whose muscular build and speed should not be underestimated.

Goffredo Parise

He begins working with gallery owner Giorgio Marconi, with whom he signs an exclusive agreement.
“Exclusive in a manner of speaking,” recalls Marconi, who at the time, during a visit to Schifano’s studio, with the artist’s languid consent, signs each of the canvases that make up the triptych Io non amo la natura to ensure that it will not be given to anyone else.

Schifano begins a new cycle of works: canvases covered with psychedelic sheets of coloured Perspex, chosen to give the images a new shine, making them sparkle in a different way (the plastic materials are produced in Maurizio Savioli’s workshop in Rome). He paints with spray paint and using templates (attached to the canvases using drawing pins or staples, the traces of which he leaves visible), from which he creates figures in negative (using the silhouette as a screen) or in positive (using the silhouette as a stencil).
The primary source of the image is always a photograph, as in the works Chiamato K Malewič and Senza titolo, which reproduce a photo of El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich taken in Vitebsk in 1920, or in the Futurismo rivisitato cycle, which features the silhouettes of Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini immortalized in Paris in 1912 in a famous group photo.
His works are not quotations, but revisitations. He discovers the word “revisited” in the title of Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited and, with the content it expresses, finds it as beautiful as an image.

1966

In January, Alberto Arbasino reports in an article that Schifano wants to stop painting in order to devote himself to other, more stimulating and less limited forms of imagery: photography and cinema. He is among the first to sense the crisis facing the painted image and seeks in cinema the possibility of expressing man in the most stripped-down and natural way.

He intensifies his work as a filmmaker and photographer, but does not stop painting.

He makes the short films Ferreri, with the participation of his friend and director Marco Ferreri, and Carol + Bill, with William Berger and Carol Lobravico, performer of the Living Theatre, Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot.

The works, covered with coloured Perspex sheets, are exhibited in November in Milan in the exhibition ‘Inventario con anima e senza anima (Anna C spray tela plastica)’ at Studio Marconi and in January 1967 in Rome at the Galleria La Tartaruga.

Exchange of portraits with Renato Guttuso: Guttuso paints a portrait of Schifano (probably working from a photograph by Ugo Mulas) and Schifano creates the work Ingegnere, based on the photograph that Guttuso is using for the portrait of his father, Gioacchino Guttuso, agrimensore.

1967

Schifano lives and works for a few months in Milan as a guest of Giorgio Marconi, who rents a house-studio for him in Via Amedei.

The artist makes a number of short films: Fotografo, with models from Gattinoni; Anna (Anna Carini al naturale), where, as in other films to come, the lens enters the frame; Vietnam, a montage of war images taken from television; Film, featuring, among others, Anita Pallenberg and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards; Pittore a Milano, shot with a fish-eye wide-angle lens, which includes scenes from the funeral of Giorgio Marconi’s father and the tomb of poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; and Souvenir with Gerard Malanga, poet and key figure in Warhol’s Factory, shot in Rome’s St Peter’s Square.

In June, he takes part in the exhibition ‘Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra’ at the L’Attico gallery in Rome, submitting two films: Made U.S.A. and Silenzio, now lost.

In London, he visits the Rolling Stones during the filming of Rock and Roll Circus, and in Paris, he takes photos on the set of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Week-end.

In October, Studio Marconi screens Anna Carini in agosto vista dalle farfalle, a colour film, now lost, in which Anna Carini, the artist’s partner, is filmed using a lens that multiplies the image, simulating the way butterflies see, as their eyes are made up of hundreds of tiny lenses.

With the help of his friend and producer Ettore Rosboch, he forms the band Le Stelle di Mario Schifano: Nello Marini (keyboards), Urbano Orlandi (vocals, guitar), Giandomenico Crescentini (vocals, bass) and Sergio Cerra (drums). In September, the band has its debut at the Teatro di Via Belsiana in Rome. On 28 December, the Piper Club hosts an event entitled Mario Schifano. Grande angolo sogni & stelle luce stroboscopica azione immagini suono films ballo sitar piano vibrazioni. In addition to the Mario Schifano’s Stars, Peter Hartman, Shawn Phillips, Cesare Fiorese, Ettore Rosboch, Gerard Malanga, Paul Thek, Tano Festa, Franco Angeli, Antonmario Semolini and Francesca Camerana are also in attendance at the Piper Club. The evening turns into a multimedia live event open to everyone, where images and music come together. Schifano’s short films are projected onto the musicians and dancers, the ceiling and the floor, including Anna Carini in agosto vista dalle farfalle, but also war scenes from Vietnam, a continuous barrage of slides and clips from Western films.

1968

Schifano directs his first film, Satellite, and is responsible for the direction, screenplay, colour coordination, soundtrack, editing and production. He receives praise from Adriano Aprà, one of the leading critics of arthouse cinema.

Satellite, made in just a few days, is a difficult film because it is essential, because each shot is ultimately a world, part of a rigorous structure, an idea. 

Adriano Aprà

In December, Schifano exhibits his new series of works entitled Compagni compagni at Studio Marconi in Milan. Each painting shows the same three figures of protesters, two of whom are holding a hammer and sickle, perhaps taken from a photograph of the Red Guards or other inhabitants of Maoist China. The phrase found on many works in the series – “On the right solution to the contradictions at the heart of society” – is a partially modified quote from a famous speech given by Mao in 1957, published in Italy in 1967 in a pamphlet printed by the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) in Beijing.

Through his friend Ettore Rosboch, Schifano is commissioned to create a work for the dining room of Marella and Gianni Agnelli’s house in Rome. It completely covers the three walls of the room (the fourth is mainly taken up with a door) with a mosaic of fifteen canvases. Given the size of the piece, the work is carried out in the studio of a friend, the painter Franco Sarnari, where Marcello Gianvenuti, photographer and collaborator of Schifano, takes a series of photographs showing the artist at work.
Taken as a whole, the room is an anthology of the various subjects dealt with in his painting: the palm trees, the stars, the anaemic landscape, the oak tree, the leafless tree, the silhouettes of Marinetti and Boccioni, the house, the horse. The right-hand wall is cut across by a quote from Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, a declaration of love for non-human creatures who suffer the unjust power of men: “But I placed a finger on my lip as if to tell her to be silent regarding this grave question, the elements of which I did not want her to understand as yet in order not to do violence to her childish imagination by a strong feeling, and I hastened to change the subject, one painful to discuss for any being belonging to a race that has extended an unjust domination over other animals of creation.”

1969

Schifano shoots two more films, which with Satellite make up the so-called trilogy: Umano non umano, produced by Ettore Rosboch, and Trapianto, consunzione e morte di Franco Brocani-Dedalo ‘69.

Umano non umano is presented at the 30th Venice International Film Festival in the ‘Experimental Films’ section in 1969.

Trapianto, consunzione e morte di Franco Brocani-Dedalo ’69 is presented at the 31st Venice International Film Festival in the ‘Cinema undergorund’ section in 1970.

Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger è morto is released, featuring clips from Mario Schifano’s short films.

1970

Schifano travels to the United States with his partner Nancy Ruspoli to carry out preliminary location scouting for the filming of Human Lab – Laboratorio umano.
The story is taken from a novel by Primo Levi (Alcune applicazioni del Mimete published by Einaudi in 1966 in the collection Storie naturali). He needs to write the screenplay with Tonino Guerra, poet and trusted screenwriter for many established directors, including Michelangelo Antonioni. Carlo Ponti wants to produce the film with an American partner.
It is a paradoxical biological hypothesis of the future, an idea rooted in the present, with violent, unpredictable developments. That is essentially the plot: post-atomic era and post-space era. Cape Kennedy has become a museum. The attendant, Gordon, duplicates his wife Mary as a flesh-and-blood robot named Eva, capable only of imitating what she sees. Mary is worried, she wants a child, she wonders when her double will disappear, she questions herself, she travels – New York, San Francisco, Los Alamos – and returns. One day, Eva sees a violent scene on television, goes to the bedroom where the husband and wife are, and kills them. Finally, she collapses, lifeless, among a pile of rubbish.
During his scouting visits, Schifano takes numerous photographs: at the Pentagon in Washington, at Arlington National Cemetery, at the Bank of America headquarters in San Francisco, at Los Alamos in New Mexico, at the abandoned town built around a coal mine and at the museum dedicated to Robert Oppenheimer, where a film celebrating the atomic bomb is shown, at the hospital in Houston, at NASA and at Cape Kennedy.
The film Human Lab is not made, perhaps because its anti-Americanism leads to the loss of the US producer, or perhaps because the lengthy periods required for major productions do not suit Schifano.

At the beginning of the year, the artist experiments with new groups of works, transferring photographs onto canvas using the emulsion technique.

Era atomica ’A’ consists of four emulsified canvases retouched using enamels and anilines, each imprinted with fourteen images taken from the documentary on Robert Oppenheimer Schifano has seen in Los Alamos in the spring. Recognizable elements include portraits of the scientist, Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, a detail of the Enola Gay bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and the mushroom cloud produced by the atomic bomb.

The triptychs Tableau peint pour raconter l’inquietude amoreuse de Susi and Fantasia del paziente naturale present an indecipherable set of images, placed side by side or superimposed, probably referring to the congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held in 1969 in Rome, marking the first time this major event took place in Italy.

In summer, Schifano completes the cycle Influenza estiva da Francesco R, theoretically dedicated to Nancy Ruspoli’s son.

In November, he takes part in the exhibition ‘Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960–70’, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

In December, he exhibits the Paesaggi TV at Studio Marconi, the best known and most linguistically innovative result of his recent production: emulsified canvases printed with photographs taken from television screens, retouched in colour and then sealed inside Perspex boxes.

He travels in the East.

1971 - 1973

Schifano lives and works at Palazzo Ruspoli in Largo Goldoni, Rome.

He meets Emilio Mazzoli, marking the beginning of a lasting friendship and a lengthy professional partnership. From then on, on several occasions, he works at his paintings in Modena while hosted by the gallery owner.

Various sources attest to the artist’s financial support for non-parliamentary left-wing groups, especially Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua.

In October 1972, he presents a new series of emulsified canvases in a solo exhibition at the Galleria L’Uomo e l’arte in Milan. The walls of the exhibition space are “papered” with images. Among the works on display are those entitled Ore 22.15 – Maestro italiano del Novecento, taken from a RAI documentary on Giorgio de Chirico made by Franco Simongini.

In March 1973, Schifano’s work is included in the first major exploration dedicated to the relationship between painting and photography, ‘Combattimento per un’immagine’, curated by Daniela Palazzoli and Luigi Carluccio at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin. That same year, he takes part in two of the four exhibitions that make up the 10th Quadriennale. Achille Bonito Oliva invites him to the major international multidisciplinary exhibition, ‘Contemporanea’, promoted by Incontri Internazionali d’Arte in the Parcheggio di Villa Borghese, where his work is featured in both the art and cinema sections.

1974

Between February and March, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle curates the first major retrospective of Schifano’s work at the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma. The exhibition – the largest ever dedicated to the artist – brings together around three hundred works produced between 1960 and 1973. The exhibition is seen by over twelve thousand visitors.

He lives in an apartment on the main floor of Palazzo Primoli, where he has set up a screening room fully lined with black and white-striped damask.

When Mario Schifano is not working, he watches an average of six films a day: three in the afternoon and four at night. In his bedroom, in front of a beautiful carved wooden Empire bed that looks like a boat, there are eight identical televisions all working simultaneously, six cameras and eight recorders.

Luisa Spagnoli

The English scholar Mario Praz, an art critic and refined collector, lives in the same building. Luchino Visconti draws inspiration from their relationship for the subject of his film Conversation Piece.

1975

On 12 March, the solo exhibition entitled Inventario opens at the Galleria Sangallo in Florence, accompanied by an introduction by Lara Vinca Masini and Stefano Canapa. The new canvases feature prints of photographic images of paintings from the 1960s, taken during the iconographic campaign conducted by Marcello Gianvenuti for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition in Parma. The technique applied involves an additional step compared to that used for previous emulsified canvases: a photograph of each painting is recorded on magnetic tape and the video is transmitted from the television screen, which is then photographed and the photograph used to emulsify the canvas.

On 15 March, an exhibition of works from the 1960s, introduced by Achille Bonito Oliva, opens in Rome at the Galleria D’Alessandro Ferranti. Other exhibitions dedicated to the works of that decade, which has suddenly become topical again, followed one after another: at the Galleria Niccoli in Parma, the Galleria Civica in Modena, the Galleria Peccolo in Livorno, and at AAM – Architettura Arte Moderna in Rome.

1978

The photographs taken in 1970 in the United States during location scouting for the film Human Lab are printed on gelatin silver-coated baryta paper and displayed in the first exhibition entirely dedicated to ‘Schifano fotografo’, curated by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle at the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (CSAC) at the University of Parma.

Between February and March, the artist presents a collection of Polaroids in an exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. He takes photographs continuously, using his famous SX 70 or other instant cameras. His is a everyday reportage: details of his studio-home, television images, others images taken from newspapers, mysterious cosmic visions, his works, his friends.

He takes part in the Venice Biennale in the section ‘Sei stazioni per artenatura. La natura dell’arte’ curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, with a work from the 1960s, and in the section ‘Art and Cinema’ curated by Vittorio Fagone, exhibiting the short films Round Trip and Satellite.

1980

Schifano begins the 1980s as a figure who is already being historicized, with a clear idea of his role and the value of his early works. In the increasingly numerous retrospectives on Italian experiences of the last two decades, his name is invariably present: represented by the monochrome period or the subsequent works linked to the mass imagery of television.

In January, the exhibition ‘Mario Schifano 1970 - 1980. Laboratorio umano e pittura’ opens at the Galleria Comunale in Cesena, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and promoted by Emilio Mazzoli. The extensive catalogue accompanying the exhibition documents Schifano’s paintings from the 1970s, the Oasi and Al mare series, and his paintings featuring bicycles and horses.

Schifano, helped by an inherent nomadism, a happy amorality and a lack of operational dogmas, moved on to a style of painting that manages to find the necessity and pleasure of existence directly within the confines of his own work.

Achille Bonito Oliva

Germano Celant invites him to the exhibition Identité italienne. Art en Italie depuis 1959, held between June and September at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

‘Viaggiatore notturno’ is the exhibition that opens in October at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome, curated by Federica Di Castro, where drawings, Polaroids and photographs reworked by the artist before or after printing are on display.

1982

A landmark year, full of accolades.

In May, the artist works for a couple of weeks in Turin, in the Mulino Feyles building, home to the Galleria Tucci Russo, where he exhibits his newly painted canvases: Architetture, Ballerini, Orti botanici, Particolare di Maestro francese. Corrado Levi observes him at work and provides a vivid account of this process in the exhibition catalogue.

Ancor prima di disegnare incolla sui bordi della tela un largo scotch di carta adesiva, a volte anche a dividere l’interno del quadro in scomparti, a pittura finita si strappa lo scotch e rimane la tela bianca come bordo alla pittura o in strisce all’interno. Dipinge con colori liquidi alla nitro trasparenti che asciugano in pochi minuti. Usa pennelli larghi e più piccoli. A dipingere un quadro impiega pochi intensissimi minuti con un grande coinvolgimento corporeo. I quadri più importanti hanno qualche volta una intonazione principale, a volte un solo colore più il bianco della tela. Le tele se già intelaiate sono poste orizzontalmente su un grande tavolo per la stesura delle tinte. Il gesto è perfettamente controllato e nello stesso tempo è noncurante. Le tele vengono drizzate e colano, finendosi così da sole. Le tele non intelaiate dipinte tutte verticalmente su un muro, cominciano a colare durante l’esecuzione. Le colature a volte vengono innescate in luoghi opportuni. Qualche volta vengono ricoperte. Vengono usate altre procedure per fermare il movimento del colore sulle tele schiacciandolo o altre per sfuocare la superficie e i contorni. Il procedere è molto veloce. Ha bisogno di un aiutante che gli tenga a portata di braccio barattoli e pennelli richiesti velocemente con impazienza. Ad un certo punto, quando meno te l’aspetti strappa lo scotch con la stessa velocità, ed è finito.

Corrado Levi

In spring, he takes part in the Avanguardia / Transavanguardia exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva along the Aurelian Walls in Rome. In summer, he exhibits at the Venice Biennale.

In June, the retrospective exhibition curated by Marco Meneguzzo opens at the Loggetta Lombardesca in Ravenna, accompanied by a catalogue that continues the historical exegesis eight years after the retrospective in Parma.

On 11 December, he opens his solo exhibition at Emilio Mazzoli’s gallery in Modena.

1983 - 1984

The Galleria Bergamini in Milan dedicates an exhibition to Schifano, displaying a number of works including the Giardini e Ninfee cycles.

Success reaches new heights.

He completes Deserts, ten paintings created using enamel paints and real desert sand, which have strong autobiographical overtones, and which he shows at the Royal Cultural Centre in Amman in February 1985.

In his new cycles, Fiori d’acqua and Campi di grano, and in works such as Suono del flauto e boschetto, he applies colour in two stages: first with generous brushstrokes of enamel on the background, then with acrylics squeezed from the tube to identify shapes and outlines. The visual graft is still photographic in nature – “I leaf through newspapers,” he says in an interview, “now there’s one called ‘Gardenia’: hey, it’s a miracle!” – but he no longer uses silhouettes or projected figures. Never before has he worked the entire painting freehand, without a base sketch, technical tools or tracing.

At the Venice Biennale curated by Maurizio Calvesi, ‘Arte e arti. Attualità e storia’, he exhibits several works in which he has “revisited” the work of other artists, including Chiamato K Malewič and 22:15 Maestro italiano del Novecento.

In summer, the exhibition ‘Naturale sconosciuto’, curated by Alain Cueff, opens at the Palazzo delle Prigioni Vecchie in Venice.

The artist stays in Gibellina, the town destroyed by the earthquake that Mayor Ludovico Corrao is rebuilding with the help of artists. He creates ten large paintings on site, which he then donates. “I believe it is specifically an inventory of all my work in recent years,” he declares after painting wheat fields, fruit, botanical gardens, radiant suns and rippling seas, “as if this series offered me the opportunity to retrace my painting journey as a whole, and so to bring a specific phase to a close. Now that I’m back in Rome, I’m going to start another.”

1985

In a former garage in Saxa Rubra, Rome, Schifano creates three large paintings: Incidente, Osservatorio and Terminale, to be exhibited at that year’s Nouvelle Biennale de Paris. We see him at work in Marcello Gianvenuti’s photographs.

In Florence, at the opening of the Etruscan Project on the night of 16 May in Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, Schifano, surrounded by five thousand people, covers forty square metres of canvas in less than three hours, creating the work Amare chimere. He is accompanied by several students from the Academy of Fine Arts, his gallery owner Emilio Mazzoli, his assistant Renzo Colombo, Marcello Gianvenuti, who is photographing the event, and Ettore Rosboch, who is filming it. Achille Bonito Oliva is providing live commentary.

Schifano marries Monica De Bei, and son Marco Giuseppe is born.

1986 - 1989

On 14 February 1986, Lucio Amelio’s gallery in Naples opens the exhibition 100 informazioni su Napoli e dintorni, showing one hundred small canvases painted for the occasion. In spring, the work Sussulto, a nocturnal landscape illuminated by the active mouth of a volcano, is exhibited in the exhibition Terrae Motus, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, dedicated to the collection assembled by Lucio Amelio after the 1980 Irpinia earthquake. The works are exhibited in March at Villa Campolieto in Herculaneum and then, in the spring of 1987, at the Grand Palais in Paris.

A huge fan of cycling, the artist is commissioned in 1989 by the organizers of the Tour de France to design the jerseys for the various categories of riders, including the famous yellow jersey for the winner.

That same year, he takes part in the exhibition ‘Arte italiana del XX secolo’ at the Royal Academy in London and in the exhibition ‘Orientamento dell’arte italiana. Roma 1947-1989’, which tours Russia.

1990

In June, the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma reopens after extensive restoration with three exhibitions, one of which is ‘Schifano. Divulgare 1990’, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and supported by Ovidio Jacorossi.
Alongside his most recent series of paintings, he exhibits works created using a new experimental process involving the use of computers and printing on PVC sheets. Orizzontale, Ghiacciato, Palestina, Meteomalato, and Tracce di minacce are among the works on display. Some have Arabic inscriptions matching the titles, all directly referring to the most critical issues of the day, the crisis in the Middle East and the climate emergency.

Schifano is actively involved in projects supporting Greenpeace, the UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency) and other voluntary organizations.

The monograph by Pierluigi Tazzi and Giorgio Verzotti, edited by Gió Marconi, Schifano ’60 / ’70, is published by Fabbri Editori.

1991 - 1992

He paints Sorrisi scomparsi, an explicit reference to the Gulf War.

‘Estroverso’ is the title of the exhibition at the Galleria d’arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and accompanied by a book that brings together “an extroverted family of paintings, which are not related to each other”, including Il parto numeroso della moglie del collezionista, Il suono del flauto e boschetto, and more recent works such as Cultura.

He moves his studio to Via delle Mantellate.

1993

In March, the exhibition Udienza, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, opens at Emilio Mazzoli’s gallery, with Schifano exhibiting his unpublished series dedicated to cardinals. The source of the images is once again television. In the catalogue, the iconic statements superimposed on the images of the paintings read: “Preachers and opinion makers, I was the audience to whom you gave audience. But what I saw, I did, and what I do is consumed. Now it is I, in my paintings, who give you audience, and you, listeners for the first time, will be my audience.”

He takes part in the Venice Biennale with a project conceived in collaboration with Enrico Ghezzi, Mario Schifano con aurea e senza aurea – The Making of: a one-hour video on monitors connected to a printer. Visitors were invited to choose a frame, print it and take it home with them.

For thirty years, Schifano has been moving his images, with a long-standing philosophical strategy… he has given painting the power to play with the inconsistency of the moment and has taken away cinema’s basic illusion, that of being able to photograph time… Human-non-human, Schifano-non-Schifano. Each image is split, slipping out of itself, it is the picture and its off-frame existence.

Enrico Ghezzi

1994 - 1996

In the second half of the 1990s, Schifano is involved in major exhibitions dedicated to 20th-century Italian art, such as The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, curated by Germano Celant in 1994 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, then transferred to the Triennale di Milano and the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, and the exhibition ‘Minimalia’, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1997, first at Palazzo Querini Dubois in Venice and then transferred to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and to the P.S.1 in New York.
From autumn 1996, the solo exhibition Musa Ausiliaria, also curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, presents his work in Latin America, Spain and Northern Europe.

Numerous commissions in various fields require the artist’s involvement: he designs the poster for the G7 summit in Naples, the pink jersey for the Giro d’Italia, and the new image for Stet-Telecom for the introduction of the internet in Italy.

He travels to Brazil. When the local authorities demand that the colour of the houses in the Morro Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro be standardized in order to camouflage their presence in the landscape, he paints a small house on top of the hill in the Rio suburb white.

1998

He dies in Rome on 26 January, aged 63.