On Mimmo Rotella: Germano Celant in conversation with Elizabeth Mangini
March 06, 2017
Join us for an evening with art historian and curator Germano Celant, exploring the early work of Mimmo Rotella (1918-2006), on the occasion of the opening of a new exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery, “Mimmo Rotella: Selected Early Works,” realized in collaboration with the Mimmo Rotella Institute in Milan. Celant, the editor in charge of the Rotella catalogue raisonné project, will be in conversation with Elizabeth Mangini, Associate Professor and Chair of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts and an art historian who specializes in European art of the 1960s-70s.
The Gladstone show, which encompasses works from 1953-1962, bookends two pivotal moments for Rotella in the United States: his year as a Fulbrighter “Artist in Residence” at the Kansas City University in 1951-52, and 1962, when two of his works were included in the “New Realists” exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, which presented the most important artists involved in international Pop Art. This talk will explore the pioneering décollage and retro d’affiche techniques that Rotella developed in these years, as well as the impact that his relations with artists such as Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Salvatore Scarpitta, and others had on his creative process; and look to place Rotella in a larger context of post-war European and American art.
MISSED THE PROGRAM? WATCH THE VIDEO!
Reception to follow. Reception and videography generously underwritten by Gladstone Gallery.
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
6pm – arrival and registration; viewing of the de Chirico / Paolini exhibition
6.20pm – conversation program begins, followed by Q&A
7:30pm – reception
Germano Celant has been Artistic Director of the Prada Foundation in Milan since 1993. Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1940, he became nationally and internationally renowned after coining the term ‘Arte Povera’ in 1967. Author of numerous books, he has collaborated with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where he worked as Senior Curator. He is the editor in charge of the Mimmo Rotella catalogue raisonné, of which the first volume was recently published.
Elizabeth Mangini, Associate Professor and Chair of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts, is an art historian who specializes in social histories of postwar and contemporary art, especially European art of the 1960s-70s. Her current research projects include a study of Arte Povera in Turin, and a book on Italian sculpture and phenomenology in 1960s-70s. She is on the editorial board of Palinsesti, a journal of Italian Contemporary Art.
