A tribute to Mario Schifano (1934-1998), an artist who understood how to reconcile painting with technological experimentation.
[Mario Schifano Everything] “You should make an exhibition of quality, modern and virtual, with a few paintings in dark rooms and lots of projections.” This show in Rome complies with the wishes of Mario Schifano (1934-1998), an artist who understood how to reconcile painting with technological experimentation. The volume includes, together with the contribution of his wife Monica De Bei Schifano, curator of the show/catalogue together with Silvana Bonfili and Stefania Fabri, eleven essays by art critics, historians and journalists: Barbara Tosi, Luca Ronchi, Fulvio Abbate, Alberto Boatto, Achille Bonito Oliva, Enrico Ghezzi, Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Silvana Bonfili and Stefania Fabri. The three sections cover thirty works that represent the artist’s versatile approach focusing on communication, using the media and their icons, like television, the artist’s “auxiliary muse”. Cinema was also very important for Schifano: “Painting, in spite of everything, doesn’t manage to fulfill me. It’s because people resemble film more than painting: in a film they walk, they eat, they make love, just as in real life; but not in painting”. The texts are illustrated, in part, by frames from the film “Mario Schifano. Tutto” by Luca Ronchi, shown at the Venice Film Festival.