The Cannaviello Art Studio officially reopens its Milan gallery on Oct. 23, 2025 at 6 p.m., inaugurating its new location at 1 Via Pagliano, following months-long renovations. The reopening coincides with the 57th year of operation of the exhibition space, which returns to operate in the heart of the city with a cultural calendar focused on contemporary and modern art. For the occasion, the gallery is offering a major retrospective dedicated to Mimmo Rotella ( Catanzaro, 1918 - Milan, 2006), a prominent Italian artist of Nouveau Réalisme. The exhibition brings together more than 30 works created between 1959 and 2001, five years before the artist’s death. The selection includes works of different sizes, from small formats to large compositions, with the intention of tracing the entire span of Rotella’s production, offering a comprehensive view of his techniques and stylistic evolutions over more than four decades.
The exhibition highlights the distinctive character of his work, particularly the décollage technique. In the early works on display, torn posters provide a pretext for compositional experiments, in which forms and colors interact freely, without narrative constraints. The exhibition then documents later productions, featuring large film posters from the last decades of the 20th century, in which movie posters and the artist’s ability to transform consumer materials into works of art emerge. There is no shortage of examples of the Overpaintings, in which décollage is supplemented with pictorial interventions, making the artist’s hand more evident and giving greater density to the surface. Special attention is given to Multiple Originals, silkscreen works on which Rotella intervened manually with tears and lacerations, ensuring the uniqueness of each piece. The exhibition displays thirteen of these works: although derived from the same matrix, each maintains individual characteristics, without mechanical repetition, offering the viewer an original visual experience for each composition.
Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro in 1918. After his first exhibition in Rome in 1951, the artist moved to the United States, coming into contact with prominent figures such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock. Upon returning to Italy between 1953 and 1954, he developed the décollage technique, which would become his hallmark throughout his career. Rotella represents the only Italian included in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, theorized by critic Pierre Restany. In 2000 the Rotella Foundation was founded, on his initiative, with the aim of protecting and promoting the artist’s work. His production has been exhibited in museums of international significance, including MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Venice Biennale, the ICA in London, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Studio d’arte Cannaviello had already hosted Rotella’s works in 1998, in the old venue on Via Cusani, with an exhibition dedicated to Superpittitture.
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| Milan, new home of Cannaviello Art Studio reopens with a Mimmo Rotella retrospective |
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