Painter, visionary, and experimenter of Italian Pop Art, Mario Schifano (Homs, 1934 – Rome, 1998) was one of the key figures of 20th-century Italian art. A central figure in the so-called Piazza del Popolo School, he is known for profoundly renewing pictorial language, blending tradition and contemporaneity with a critical and multidisciplinary approach. His work encompasses Pop Art, experimental cinema, photography, and the pioneering use of digital media, making him an essential reference for understanding the evolution of contemporary art in Italy.
After moving to Rome after the war, he began working as a restorer, an experience that brought him into direct contact with materials and art history. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed a personal language: he created his famous "monochrome canvases," flat surfaces marked by essential graphic elements, which marked a clear departure from Art Informel.
In 1962, he was invited to the exhibition "The New Realists" at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, alongside the great names of American Pop Art. But his vision was more restless and reflective: through advertising signs, artificial landscapes, and road signs, he explored the visual bombardment of consumer society, anticipating today's central themes such as the seriality of images and media manipulation.
In the 1970s, he devoted himself to avant-garde cinema with films such as Umano non umano (1972), and to experimental music with Mario Schifano's band Le Stelle. At the same time, he began using television images as a basis for painting, fusing photography, painting, and video in hybrid works, true precursors of post-media art.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he returned to gestural painting and his dialogue with the Renaissance masters, incorporating quotations from Botticelli and Leonardo into compositions dense with contemporary references. He also continued to work on photographic emulsions and manipulate television frames, logos, and symbols.
Mario Schifano died prematurely in 1998, leaving behind a vast body of work, still being rediscovered today by collectors, critics, and museums. His works are held in important international public collections.
His works are present in some of the most important public and private collections internationally, including the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the MoMA in New York, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Considered one of the key figures of the Italian art scene of the second half of the twentieth century, Schifano left an indelible mark on contemporary art with his innovative visual language, which spanned Pop Art, sign painting, media, and technological experimentation.
