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.