Cici ThompsonROME—Shortly after NASA landed its first crew on the moon on 20 July, 1969, Mario Schifano traveled across the U.S. with princess Nancy Ruspoli, visiting both NASA and the Pentagon. A lover of the United States and its culture, Schifano also traveled to Tunisia, Egypt and Paris. Unfortunately, due to drug abuse and mental health issues, Schifano earned the label of un artista maledetto in certain Italian magazines, the cursed artist of pop art, which he joked about in a recent interview in 1983 widely shared on TikTok.
Schifano was born in Homs, Libya, as his father was an archaeologist and restorer working on the excavations at Leptis Magna. The family moved to Rome during an evacuation from the African colonies and he worked at the National Etruscan Museum before joining the military briefly. Upon his return, he took up painting seriously: In 1960, a cycle of monochrome paintings with stamped numbers and letters led to his inclusion in the 1962 exhibition The New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, setting him alongside names like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Christo. Submitted to the event was a “Propaganda” painting featuring part of the Coca-Cola logo:
Schifano made his first trip to America with his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, in the early 60s, and stayed in New York, where he met figureheads like Andy Warol, Jasper Johns and Frank O’Hara. From this point, his life was marked by increased drug use covered widely in the press. In 1966, he spent three months in the Regina Coeli prison for marijuana, followed in the 1970s by additional arrests and his eventual confinement to a psychiatric hospital. According to Italian writer Federico Sargentone, it was during this time that poet laureate Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888 – 1970) actively attended his trial and testified that “an artist is an individual who should not reside within the law of the common.”
Schifano would go on to struggle with heroin addiction, at times trading artworks to dealers and frustrating his gallerists. After numerous rehab efforts, he eventually did return seriously to painting, and reappeared in the 1980s with a major retrospective in Rome and a showing at the 1982 Venice Biennale.
Mario Schifano died in Rome, in 1998, of a heart attack, and is survived by his wife, Monica, and a son, Marco.
His works have steadily gained interest, with Tempo moderno (1962), a work of enamel and graphite on paper measuring 70.9 x 71.3 inches (180 x 181 cm) selling for over $3 million at Christie’s in London in 2016.
The latest exhibition at one of Rome’s most serious exhibition spaces, which began on 17 March and runs until 12 July this summer, highlights Schifano’s obsession with “mediated image”, a term which, according to Milan art foundation of Giorgio Marconi, describes a new objectivity focusing on how the world is mediated by mass media (movies, signals, cartoons, advertising).
The exhibition covers works all the way up to the 1990s via a rotunda and seven large rooms on the main floor of Palazzo delle Esposizioni which offer a chronological telling of his artistic biography, from his early monochromes to political commentary on Vietnam, to the Gulf War.
Mario Schifano
17 March until 12 July, 2026
Palazzo delle Esposizioni Roma
Via Nazionale 194, 00184 Rome
Website
Marguerite de Ponty
Madina Tulakova
Richard Aubern
Bob Loblaw
John Hudson White