KunstenaarItaliangeb.1934–ov.1998
Mario Schifano
9 actieve items
Mario Schifano was born in Homs, Libya in 1934, moving to Rome after the Second World War where he grew up in a household shaped by his father's work as an archaeologist and ceramics restorer. He never attended formal art school. Instead, he absorbed the surfaces and textures of Rome's streets - its billboards, crumbling plaster, and stencilled signage - and began painting in the late 1950s with an urgency that immediately drew critical attention.
His breakthrough came with the Monocromi series begun around 1960, large canvases coated in industrial enamel on wrapping paper glued to support. These were not emptied or meditative surfaces in the manner of Yves Klein; they held material tension, the paper buckling beneath paint, the edges suggesting fragmentation. Schifano showed the work at Galleria La Salita in Rome and won the Premio Lissone in 1961 for young contemporary painters. The following year he was included in New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, exhibiting alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
What followed was a restless cycle of series rather than a single settled style. The Paesaggi anemici of the mid-1960s turned Rome's degraded urban fabric into something between painting and photographic document. The Futurismo rivisitato series (1966) reprocessed Italian Futurist imagery through a Pop lens, treating the historical avant-garde as raw visual material rather than a lineage to be continued. He worked with coloured Perspex, incorporated television imagery, and made early experiments with video as an artistic medium. Schifano was also photographed alongside Andy Warhol and mixed easily in international art circles, though his relationship to American Pop Art was more parallel than derivative - rooted in the specific visual culture of Rome rather than New York.
His personal life was chaotic, shaped by a long-term drug addiction that brought periodic legal difficulties and public attention. He continued working prolifically regardless, and by the time of his death in Rome in January 1998, he had produced an enormous body of work across painting, works on paper, and time-based media. Retrospectives and critical reassessments have continued; a major retrospective was held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and his work is held in the collections of MoMA in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
On the auction market, Schifano's record stands at USD 2.3 million for Tempo Moderno (1962), sold at Sotheby's Paris in 2022. Within the Auctionist database, 25 items have appeared under his name, primarily prints and engravings (17 works) alongside paintings (5 works). The strongest results have come through Italian specialists: Pandolfini Casa d'Aste accounts for 15 items and Wannenes Art Auctions for 8. Top recorded prices on the platform include EUR 40,000 for the enamel-on-paper work Solare and EUR 37,650 for Composizione azzurra.