Mimmo Rotella studied art at the School of Fine Arts in Naples in the 1930s and later moved to Rome. Here he conducted research and experiments in various directions: photographs, photo-montages, décollages, assemblages of heterogeneous objects, phonetic poetry, primitive music.
In 1951-1952 he was in the United States thanks to a scholarship from the "Fullbright Foundation" in Kansas City received first as a student and then as an artist.
In 1954, Emilio Villa invited him to exhibit his torn posters in a group show. Of his first works, Rotella recalls that they were born during a period in which, walking often through the streets of Rome, he felt more and more attracted by those poster-matter left on the walls and so he began to collect them, tearing them up at night in secret. Villa said of these colourful décollages that they were the discovery of a new space compared to cubist collage. Rotella's works immediately caught the attention of critics and avant-garde collectors, and this first exhibition was followed by many others.
In 1955 he exhibited his 'lacerated manifestos' for the first time in Rome in the exhibition Sette pittori sul Tevere (Seven painters on the Tiber) at the Zattere del Ciriola in Rome and in the personal exhibition at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, where he also participated in the Premio Graziano 1955. In 1956 he took part in the collective exhibition Dorazio, Perilli, Rotella, Sanfilippo, Fasola at the Selecta Gallery in Rome. In 1961 he participated at the invitation of the French critic Pierre Restany in the Nouveaux Réalistes group (Arman, Cesar, Christo, Deschamps, Dufrêne, Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Spoerri, Tinguely, Villeglé).
In 1965, he joined - together with Gianni Bertini and other artists - the Mec-art movement, an abbreviation of 'mechanical art', in which works were created by transferring photographic images onto emulsified canvas. At the end of the 1960s he produced the artypo plastiques, proofs of prints, colours, perceptions, transferred onto rigid plastic supports. An exponent of Nouveau Réalisme, Rotella made a name for himself by making art a behaviour: “Playing with eroticism and intellectual speculation, Rotella is an agitator who passes through various styles with a dandy detachment” wrote Otto Hahn.
After travelling the world, the artist settled in Milan and never returned to Calabria, but he always considered it the intellectually fertile humus in which his work took root. His maternal home, acquired by the city of Catanzaro, was transformed into the Mimmo Rotella Foundation in 2000, destined to house a museum, an archive and temporary events. Subsequently, the city of Catanzaro commissioned him a large décollage, La leggenda di Icaro [The Legend of Icarus], for the Lamezia Terme airport and dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him, to which the artist responded with a poster entitled Un tacco a spillo [A stiletto heel], created from a poster torn from the city walls. In the meantime, France dedicated a large retrospective exhibition to him at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice (2000). Rotella worked extensively in New York and especially in Paris, where he is well known.
In 2001, two important anthological exhibitions: in Florence (Centro d'arte Spaziotempo) and in Pisa (Palazzo Lanfranchi) for which the relevant monographs were published.
Since 2000, he has been working on a project focusing on sacred images in the history of Italian art, which are now part of the urban landscape through street posters advertising exhibition-events. Only a few testimonies of this cycle, called Sacre Passioni [Sacred Passions], exist, including the masterpiece Parlando con Dio [Talking to God] of 2004, an enormous décollage executed on the image of a sorrowful 13th-century Christ. In 2004, Rotella received an honorary degree in Architecture from the Università degli Studi Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria.
Mimmo Rotella was a frequent visitor to the Santa Barbara Museum in Mammola (RC), considered one of the most important Museums of Modern Art, where he left numerous works of art.
In recent years, he had dedicated himself to another important exhibition project on Cinecittà posters, in homage to the mythical and uninterrupted work begun in the 1960s, presented in the inaugural exhibition Mimmo Rotella. Cinecittà, at Frittelli arte contemporanea, in April 2006.
He never stopped inventing and creating until the end of his days.
