In the early 1970s, Mario Schifano experienced a crisis in relation to painting, a crisis that coincided with a general reconsideration of pictorial tradition, triggered by the success of conceptual neo-avant-gardes. The artist then developed a completely new imaginary, based on the media images constantly streaming on the always-on television screens at home and in his studio.
With his particular multimedia sensitivity, Schifano photographed images of all kinds transmitted by television, extracting and reformulating the image through an operation that blends photography and painting. He worked, as always, with immediacy and speed. The photo passed through his painterly manual dexterity and was captured in time. That concept of the "flow of images" which constitutes the life and art of Schifano was perfected and clarified: reality constantly mediated by a filter, transforming it into an image.
Mario Schifano was born on September 20, 1934, in Homs, Italian Libya. After the end of the war, he returned to Rome. Considered by many as a leading figure of Italian pop art, he was seen as Andy Warhol's heir, representing a cornerstone of contemporary Italian and European art. A passionate student of new painting techniques, in the early 1970s he began transferring images seen and photographed on TV onto emulsified canvases, isolating these visual fragments from the narrative rhythm of the sequences to which they belonged. In the following years, Schifano, already fascinated by media communication and contemporary icons created by television, was among the first to experiment with hybrids between painting and other art forms such as music, cinema, video, and photography. In fact, he used computers to create artworks and managed to elaborate images from the computer and transfer them back onto emulsified canvases (the "Computerized Canvases").