The SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen Museum (Sindelfingen) is dedicating a museum exhibition for the first time in Germany to Mario Schifano (Homs, 1934 - Rome, 1998), one of the main protagonists of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century. The retrospective When I remember, which opens Sunday, Oct. 19, 2025 at 11:30 a.m. with free admission and can be visited until June 21, 2026, is also the first major European exhibition outside Italy dedicated to the artist in the past three decades. An ambitious project that aims to restore to the public the complexity of a creative journey spanning nearly four decades, through a body of more than 80 works, including painting, collage, drawing, film and photography.
The exhibition spans the entire span of Schifano’s production, from his beginnings in the early 1960s to his last works in the 1990s. A painter, filmmaker, intellectual and keen observer of contemporaneity, Schifano has constructed a visual poetics strongly rooted in the culture of his time. His works reflect a dense web of autobiographical and historical references: from the Vietnam War to his frequentations with icons of the New York scene such as Andy Warhol, Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara, to his encounters with the rock stars of the so-called “wild sixties.” In any case, his work is not limited to a simple biographical account. In it coexist success and failure, political tension and private restlessness, visionary impulse and inner instability.
From his earliest pictorial experiments, Schifano confronted the language of American Pop Art, developing a personal interpretation that privileged themes of everyday life, consumer society and mass media. Unlike his overseas counterparts, however, he chose at several points in his career to distance himself from the logic of the market, rejecting passive adherence to international expectations and taking independent research paths, even at the cost of isolation.
The exhibition emphasizes the extraordinary technical versatility of Schifano, who freely ranged between different materials and languages. Many of his works present an explicitly political or socio-critical dimension, linked to the news but filtered through a personal and visionary gaze. Particular attention is paid to the relationship with the world of media and the impact of new technologies on artistic production. Television, in particular, has been for him an object of reflection and a ground for visual experimentation.
A significant example of this tension between art and technology is the film Human Not Human, made in 1969 and featuring Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. A hybrid and experimental work, it will be presented in the exhibition for the first time alongside TV Landscapes, a series of works in which Schifano transforms television stills into photographic and pictorial images. The shift from video to canvas highlights his interest in the narrative potential of the moving image and its transposition to traditional media. In the 1980s and 1990s, the artist focused on large-format works characterized by a gestural, fluid and textural pictorial language. The works, often associated with the Transavantgarde season, are marked by a return to an expressive and instinctive painting, which, however, does not give up questioning the great events of the present. Themes such as the Gulf War or the geopolitical conflicts of the time become part of his iconography, without ever taking on overtly propagandistic tones.
The Sindelfingen retrospective is the result of a collaboration between SCHAUWERK, the Mario Schifano Archive in Rome and the Marconi Foundation in Milan. In addition to works from the Schaufler Collection, the museum presents a selection of never-before-exhibited loans from private collections and international institutions. The quality and breadth of the material collected allow for an in-depth reading of Schifano’s artistic evolution, offering German and international audiences the opportunity to rediscover a figure who profoundly marked Italy’s second half of the 20th century.
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| Mario Schifano, retrospective in Sindelfingen: the first museum exhibition in Germany |
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