$8,500
Estimate: $20,000 - $30,000
Auction: October 29, 2019 12:00:00 PM EDT
Signed and dated 63 bottom right, signed and dated again and titled verso, screenprint on canvas.
33 1/8 x 32 in. (84.1 x 81.3cm)
Unframed
Provenance: Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Richard E. Oldenburg, New York, New York.
note:
We have submitted this lot for authentication to the artist's foundation. The foundation requires a minimum of three months to render its opinion, so authentication is ongoing. Given this, the following special buying terms will apply for the Rotella. Freeman's will hold the funds submitted by the Rotella's successful buyer, as well as the painting, until we have final confirmation from the foundation. We expect this to occur by December. Presuming they confirm authenticity, we will release proceeds to the consignor and the painting to the buyer. Should the committee reject the work, we will cancel the sale without penalty and refund all monies to the buyer for the Rotella
Italian artist Mimmo Rotella began his artistic career as an abstract painter in the 1950s, spending two years in the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to Rome in 1953. While in the U.S. he met Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Jackson Pollock, among others, and upon returning home gave up painting in favor of a new mode of representation. Rotella termed the phrase "double décollages" for his method of tearing advertising posters off of city walls, affixing them to canvas in his studio, and then tearing them again into pieces for reassembly. He thereby employed mass media imagery in the service of his abstraction, in much the way Rauschenberg was concurrently working in the United States. Ars-Gratia-Artis comes from a slightly later period, in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the artist explored different typographic products and methods of reproduction toward a new end. As Rotella stated: "I inverted my old approach: first I tried to disintegrate, now I try to reintegrate that matter, that reality." The monochrome, muted prints on canvas also play to his lifelong experimentation with poetry, in which the artist invented words, sounds, and repetitive imagery, creating a language all his own in the spheres of visual and literary arts.