(Homs/Libya 1934–1998 Rome)
Milano, second half of the seventies, signed, titled and inscribed on the reverse, enamel on paper laid on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

This work is registered in the Archivio Mario Schifano, Rome and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity.

Provenance:
Bocchi Collection, Siena (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, Italy
Sale Sotheby’s Milan, 25 May 2012, lot 184
European Private Collection

The painting Milano, executed in the second half of the Seventies is one of the many paintings that recall, in almost every aspect except for the size, an earlier work particularly dear to the artist. In fact in 1962 Schifano painted a larger work titled Milano. In the Seventies he often “repeated” works that he had executed in the Sixties probably because it was in those years that his painting career had started.

In the beginning of the Sixties the artist abandoned the use of cement and turned to proper pictorial media. “His primary intention was to redefine the vocabulary of painting by reassessing its material and conceptual components. The definition of what constitutes a monochrome shouldn’t be applied to these works in the conventi onal sense.

They are only infrequently literally mono chromatic and they don’t convey the sense of light vibration typical of monochroma tic or color field painting, though they do employ a limited set of media and expose a large area of a single color.

Through a collage technique, consisting of pasting paper sheets on canvas and using large brushes to layer enamel, Schi fano conceived painting as an impersonal rather than emotional act and devised collage as a means to investigate the ma terial texture of the surface of paintings. To achieve the effects he wanted, he used Ripolin, an oil-based utility-grade enamel that by the early 1960s had become an artisanal paint, rather than newer acrylic enamel”.

quote taken from: ROUND TRIP: From Rome to New York and back again, Francesco Guzzetti, PhD. catalogue of the exhibition, Facing America: Mario Schifano, 1960-65, Center for Italian Modern Art, New York 26/1-13/11/2021, pp 4,5