translated by Giorgina Arcuri

2008 really seems to be the year dedicated to artist Mario Schifano. Ten years from his death, the Italian art system seems to be setting to work to celebrate this author who is considered by critics the greatest talent of Italian Pop Art, acclaimed as the spiritual heir to Andy Warhol and considered, together with Tano Festa and Franco Angeli, “the damned painter” who founded the Piazza del Popolo School, an essential reference point for Italian and European contemporary art.
Schifano’s figure can be considered a rather singular presence in the art panorama of the late twentieth century, for the variety and eclectic quality of his oeuvre, inclined to delving into the languages of modernity, as well as for his tormented life inspired to the idea of the myth of the artist.
His fame as the damned artist preceded him without him doing anything to elude it, actually Schifano continued stoking it up with the myth of the handsome and damned. However, it would be too easy to reduce everything to a simple matter of magnetism of this character, as his talent as an artist would be overshadowed. For this reason, Italy is setting to work to highlight Schifano’s extraordinary creativity.
Two exhibitions have been organized to celebrate this excellent figure of Italian art: one in Parma and the other in Rome.
With regard to the first city, until 22nd June 2008 the public will be able to attend the exhibition “America Anemica” at Palazzo Pigorini, a diary of Mario Schifano’s journey to the United States in 1970 and condensed in 14 paintings preceding his journey (1962-1967), 100 polaroids and more than 200 photographs. The underlying theme of the exhibition is the narration of the journey to the States to plan a film on the USA, which was never realized: it is a narration of landscapes, the ones that he calls “Anemic landscapes”, therefore flat, disassembled, which on the one hand are anemic, without any naturalistic dimension, and on the other are incomplete, suspended in order to leave space to overlay on them, as on a screen, our experience.
While regarding the exhibition in Rome, we can say that is an interesting monograph dedicated to the author. The National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (from 11th June to 28th September 2008) through seventy paintings will try to keep alive the memory of Mario Schifano, one of the most complex artists of the second post-war period, with the objective of conveying to the spectator an overall vision of the artist’s oeuvre.
The event will include about seventy paintings, chronologically distributed throughout the four decades of Mario Schifano’s activity. An interesting part will certainly be represented by a section of about 50 drawings, selected among the many executed by Schifano, which will give the chance to think about the most intimate methods of work building and planning and a section dedicated to the photographs and films that, in the ambit of the difficult relation between painting and other media in the early seventies, will present the convincing and original solution provided by the artist.
The artist, Roman by adoption (as he was born in Homs, Libia, in 1934), is now elevated to mainstay figure in the international art panorama. An author who used to produce almost twenty works a day, leading therefore to an art production based on repetitiveness and perhaps, sometimes, on scarce quality of works. Indeed, on the market there is an exorbitant quantity of Schifano’s pieces and countless fakes in circulation that orientate too many economic interests at stake making him more a media phenomenon than a master of art and mass communication. Since 1995, there have been 2,669 passages by auction of Mario Schifano’s works, with a 69% sale percentage. We saw some rising quotations in 2004, reaching the real exploit in November 2005, when the Dorotheum of Vienna sold “New York City ‘65” for 300,000 euros (estimate 140-180 thousand euros), establishing the artist’s world record. His market has frequent exchanges, especially in Italy and Austria, but also a great turnover thanks to reference galleries, such as Giò Marconi, Galleria Zonca&Zonca in Milan, but also Sperone Westwater and Antonio Sonnabend, both in New York. However, in the last years Mario Schifano’s art market seems to have endured a slight fall (about -3.89%) and a rise in prices is mainly penalized by the lack, ten years after the artist’s death, of a general catalogue and by the relentless disagreement between the ex Foundation Mario Schifano (now Multistudio Foundation) and the Mario Schifano Archive established by his heirs, while there are still many fakes in circulation.
If a suggestion can be given to collectors, it is definitely necessary to aim at Schifano’s works dating from the early sixties, such as his uninterrupted brush strokes on glued paper on canvas or his first pop works, which are much rarer and qualitatively more appealing than his “standardized” recent production which could not give the economic satisfactions that some markets promise.
If you would like to follow up the artistic figure of Mario Schifano then you definitely cannot miss the only “complete” film (with enclosed book) about the life and works of the great Italian artist directed by Luca Ronchi, entitled “Mario Schifano tutto”. The documentary puts together extremely rare material: unpublished and private images of the artist, fragments of his untraceable film works, period interviews and true declarations. Between New York, Rome and Europe, the film reproduces, through interlocked and juxtaposed fragments, the figure of an irredeemable, passionate and “mistaken” artist, an enfant terrible who was unpredictable and peevish.