Mimmo Rotella exhibition is like a game of mirrors

(ANSA) - Catanzaro, October 9 - An exhibition titled "Mimmo Rotella and Art History" has opened in Catanzaro, the artist's birthplace, at the Casa della Memoria house/museum dedicated to Rotella.
    The show runs through August 30, 2020, and is a sort of game of mirrors that the artist plays with himself and some big names in art of the past and present, including Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Modigliani, Carrá, Picasso, and De Chirico.
    The exhibition, created by the Mimmo Rotella Foundation and curated by the Mimmo Rotella Institute, offers a selection of 19 works that highlight the link between the artist and some of the leading interpreters of art history.
    Antonella Soldaini, the show's curator and the director of the Rotella Institute, said the importance of the exhibition is "the didactic aspect, the idea of looking at how Rotella related with art history and with the characters over time".
    "It should really be a show for all the schools, because Rotella was very interested not only in himself, but also in the past, starting from classical art up to his contemporaries," Soldaini said.
    "It therefore represents an excursus through his works, from décollages to photo essays, from artypos to ready-mades, to overpainting. It shows, through his work, what others did before, and reinterprets it through his language," she said.
    "The choice to display works different from the permanent collection for such a long time comes from the need to make this space increasingly viable, alternating the collection, which everyone is familiar with, with other works by the master," Soldaini said.
    "The last room is very interesting because Rotella is compared with his contemporaries, so we find a décollage made by taking off the poster for a show by Sandro Chia, his contemporary, and the reference to the Marilyn by Andy Warhol," she said.
    Examples of comparison with the past include the genius of Caravaggio in the overpainting "Madonna of Miracles or of Pilgrims" and "When Caravaggio Arrived".
    Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is revisited through Marcel Duchamp in two works, an assemblage and a collage "Untitled".