Independent 20th Century

24 – 27 September 2026

The Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York

Independent 20th Century

For Independent 20th Century New York, VOENA is pleased to present a focussed solo presentation of works by Mimmo Rotella, highlighting the most radical and prolific decade of the artist's career, the 1960s. The presentation returns Rotella's transformative 1960s output to the city that so inspired him.

A prolific innovator throughout his artistic career, Rotella entered the 1960s building on the foundations of his 1950s innovations with materials and methods. Walking the streets of Rome in 1953, he was inspired by advertising posters on the city's walls. He began to collect them, and from this impulse arose the first of his décollage works, which refigured the graphics of these posters into elegant collage compositions, first shown publicly in 1954. In addition, he also rendered the inverse, the retro d'affiche, or poster backs, allowing rust, plaster, and sediments to meld with the image's surface. In his radical intervention, Rotella heralded the end of easel painting, declaring that art should be identified with the defiant gesture of the artist.

The presentation opens with this foundational moment, with Levigo con macchie (1956), and Materia 5 (1956), alongside the delicate early décollage of Untitled (1957), building abstraction from the discarded ephemeral surfaces of Rome's commercial life. It is in this moment that Rotella first stands alongside the innovations of his Italian contemporaries; Burri making the material speak, Fontana discovering the space beyond the canvas. Rotella integrates both, as Germano Celant observed, into a singular language. It is this visual conviction that he carries into the 1960s.

In 1960, Rotella became a founding member of Nouveau Réalisme at Pierre Restany's invitation. His aesthetics were moving away from Art Informel and toward the icons of consumer society. In décollages such as A Mezza Luna (1960), Exotic (1961) and the iconic Arachidina (1963), branding and film posters become the modern protagonists of his compositions.

When Rotella's work was shown at the New Realists exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962, it was seen as a companion to recent developments in American Pop Art, with Rotella proposing his own response to growing commercialism, marrying the European avant-garde with American mass culture.

The presentation culminates with the Artypo works, fully expressing his artistic ambition. Subverting the commercial billboard printing process, Rotella injected his late-sixties canvases with a machine-made aesthetic. Works such as La Pressa (1966) and Man to Man (1967) demonstrate a distilled visual identity, arrived at through Rotella's earlier experiments. It is in 1967 that he met with Andy Warhol, returning for a longer stay in New York in 1968 to immerse himself in the city's burgeoning artistic circles. As with Warhol, Rotella shared an obsession with cinema, celebrity, and brand, embracing commercial technologies as artistic tools. Rotella advanced a version of this impulse that was entirely his own.

Despite his acknowledged role as a pioneer on the international stage, and his deep connection to New York, there has never been a solo presentation in the United States dedicated to Rotella's work of the 1960s. Independent 20th Century 2026 offers a superb opportunity for VOENA to show these works, in the city that first recognised him.

Works

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