Mimmo Rotella

By 1947, after learning about and studying French and American art of the 1940s, he flew to the United States on a prestigious Fullbright Fondation scholarship, attending the University of Kansas. The American experience allowed Rotella to discover and learn about all the major artists and trends of those years, such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg.

After a short break in his artistic career, he began the Decollage series in 1954. This series of works would become Rotella's primary creative expression. Rotella made decollages by manipulating different advertising or movie posters taken from cities, then tearing them up (with his hands, brush handle, or scraper) and bringing them back on different types of media.

He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and at the Rome Quadriennale in 1965. Mimmo Rotella's works of art have been exhibited at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, MoMa in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Guggenheim in Venice, passing through numerous other museums and the world's most prestigious collections.

With the aim of preserving his works and documents of his artistic career, the Mimmo Rotella Foundation was established in 2000 at his behest. In 2004 he received an honorary degree in architecture from the Università degli Studi Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria.

Mimmo Rotella died in 2006.
His works can be found in many museums and major Italian and foreign collections.