Twenty years after the death of Mimmo Rotella, the Mimmo Rotella Foundation celebrates the figure of the artist with the exhibition project Autorotella, curated by Alberto Fiz and open to visitors in the Casa della Memoria in Catanzaro, the house-museum where Rotella grew up next to his milliner mother, now a space laden with memories and testimonies of his training, from January 9 until March 29, 2026. The itinerary revolves around the theme of theself-portrait and starts from a nucleus of works preserved inside the House of Memory, and then expands thanks to important loans from the Mimmo Rotella Foundation. The title Autorotella explicitly recalls the artist’s autobiography, a narrative in diaristic form that traces the events he experienced between 1966 and 1970. The result is a tight dialogue between word and image, within an exhibition project that can be interpreted as a true declaration of poetics: an original investigation of the master of décollage conducted through the multiplication and fragmentation of his own image.
The works in the exhibition cover a time span from 1958 to 1999, offering a significant synthesis of the different techniques and languages adopted by Rotella throughout his career. From the 1969Autoportrait, made on emulsified canvas, we come toNapoleonic Self-Portrait, a sheet metal with décollage and overpainting interventions, passing through another sheet metal in which the artist is depicted with his daughter Asya on his shoulders. A bronze sculpture that restores the motorcyclist’s features and a series of drawings characterized by a self-mocking and caricatured tone complete the itinerary.
In Rotella’s work, the self-portrait is devoid of any narcissistic complacency: the artist inserts himself within a complex system of signs, in which his own face can be torn, altered, repainted or transformed into an icon through the use of a mask. In this way Rotella subjects his own image to the same action of erosion and abrasion that characterizes other areas of his research, from advertising to cinema to the urban landscape. Autorotella is thus proposed as a current path to restore the transgressive and destabilizing force of an artist who, twenty years after his death, continues to keep his innovative and transgressive charge intact.
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| An exhibition in Catanzaro pays tribute to Mimmo Rotella with his self-portraits 20 years after his death |
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