Mario Schifano

Enamel on paper, mounted on canvas
39 3/4 x 41 3/4 inches (101 x 106 cm)
© Mario Schifano. All Rights Reserved, DACS
Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

If anything, the framing resembles one’s sidelong glance when passing a poster­—the urban experience of the transient gaze.
—Luigia Lonardelli

In 1962, the “New Realists” exhibition opened at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, heralding a new generation of American Pop art and French Nouveau Réalisme. The exhibition, which showed works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Arman, and Yves Klein, was also the international debut of Mario Schifano, a young painter little known outside of Italy. Belonging to the so-called Piazza del Popolo school in Rome, Schifano was then part of a conscious attempt to revisit the legacy of the Italian Futurists, responding to the constantly changing urban environment—and to the abundance of advertising posters, above all. While largely independent from American Pop, this European movement nonetheless engaged with the same driving forces. Schifano’s visit to the United States in 1962 created a bridge between the two, influencing his subsequent production.

Shortly after the Sidney Janis exhibition, Schifano began appropriating corporate logos in his works, particularly those of Esso and Coca-Cola. He tended to isolate sections of each logo and use loose painterly swirls to undermine the mechanical execution of the original signs. The ’60s paintings take on a deliberately unfinished quality; in contrast, the present work’s lines are tidier and more precise. In the ‘70s, while Schifano was largely occupied with new subjects, he began painting so-called “remakes” of his popular works of the early ’60s. The present work is part of this phase of the artist’s oeuvre and is inscribed “1964” on the reverse as an additional nod to this formative time. By 1975, the logos had become part of a personal index that the artist ritualistically repeated. A decade of formal experimentation had turned into a serious investigation of contemporary society based on the easy reproducibility of images and slogans.

The present work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Archivio Mario Schifano, signed by Monica Schifano in 2014 and numbered 02702140630.