Mario Schifano ITALIAN, 1934-1998

Mario Schifano was a pivotal Italian artist recognized for his oeuvre within various movements such as Pop Art and Arte Povera. He first gained recognition for his “Monochrome” series (1960-62) of paintings rendered in industrial enamel on paper with delineated fields of flat color. Later paintings isolated sections of famous brand logos, which became some of the most famous instances of Italian Pop Art, shown alongside contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In the late 1960s, he turned to landscapes, which manifested as semi-abstract compositions often left half-finished, showing the paper underneath. Schifano’s work has been widely exhibited, including a retrospective at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art, and his experimentation with form and cultural iconography secured his legacy as a significant figure in 20th-century Italian art.