Mario Schifano

The first volume of the Catalogue Raisonné dedicated to Mario Schifano's pictorial work explores the artist's 1960s-production. The result of an over fourteen-year research conducted by Archivio Mario Schifano, the publication is divided in four volumes, each dedicated to a single decade. This first volume presents the works the artists created from 1960 to 1969, with over 500 high-resolution pictures and about 300 mainly so-far unpublished photographs from Mario Schifano's personal archive, Achivio Ugo Mulas, and the Camilla and Earl McGrath Foundation. The son of an archaeologist head of the Leptis Magna excavations in Libya, Mario Schifano (1934-1998) carried out his apprenticeship at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, and made his artistic debut in 1960 with an exhibition in Rome presented by Pierre Restany; Schifano immediately captured the critics' interest with his mono chrome paintings evocative of the photographic screens that would later incorporate numbers, letters, road signs, and Esso and Coca Cola logos. In 1963 he travelled to the United States for the first time and met Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. His works started to include quotations from the history of Italian art and Futurism. In this period he painted his first Paesaggi anemici and in 1966-1967 he began the Ossigeno ossigeno, Tuttestelle, Oasi, and Compagni, compagni series. Besides his solo shows and his participation in national and international group exhibitions, during the 1960s Schifano also worked on full-length films, directed three exper imental films, and collaborated with a psychedelic rock band. An ideological and existential crisis forced him to isolate in his studio for periods of time during which his production focused on the reinterpretation of the art of Magritte, De Chirico, Boccioni, Cézanne, and Picabia.