Italian painter Mario Schifano was born in Al Khums (Libya) in 1934. Self-taught, he collaborated with his father, an archaeologist, on the restoration of paintings in the Etruscan museum at Villa Giulia in Rome. His first works, in the early 1960s, were large monochrome canvases. Without ever allowing himself to be enrolled in a particular school, he moved on from canvas to a wide range of materials (industrial enamel, Plexiglas sheets) and different media (Polaroid, cinema - he made...

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  Biography of Mario Schifano

  

  Italian painter Mario Schifano was born in Al Khums (Libya) in 1934. Self-taught, he collaborated with his father, an archaeologist, on the restoration of paintings in the Etruscan museum at Villa Giulia in Rome. His first works, in the early 1960s, were large monochrome canvases. Without ever allowing himself to be enrolled in a particular school, he moved on from canvas to a wide range of materials (industrial enamel, Plexiglas sheets) and different media (Polaroid, cinema - he made several feature-length films, including a trilogy at the end of the 1960s). Close to the pop art movement, he used a variety of graphics borrowed from advertising and signage; he mixed historical figures with newsreels, not from a sociological point of view but out of a desire to analyze perceptual processes. Schifano's early success in the United States in the 1960s had a resounding impact in Italy, where interest in the artist gradually grew to include interest in the man and his personal history, linked to contemporary events, scandal and creative fury. In 1962, he took part in the “ New Realists show ” organized at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, alongside young talents such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In the late 1970s, he returned to painting and large-scale canvases. In 2009, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne organized the first French retrospective of his work. The artist died in Rome in 1998.

  
  

  

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