Nathalie Karg Gallery
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Home
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • Fairs
  • News
  • Publications
  • Cumulus Studios
  • Contact
Cart
0 items $
Checkout

Item added to cart

View cart & checkout
Continue shopping
Menu
  • Current
  • Past

The Cult of Television Images (TV works from the 70s): MARIO SCHIFANO

Past exhibition
6 November - 15 December 2019
  • Press release
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Publications
Press release

Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Mario Schifano’s Paesaggi TV’ (TV Landscapes) curated by Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati. With his TV Landscapes, Mario Schifano created a cosmogony, a visual theory on painting that conveys his perception of our world and his instructions on how to make sense of it. In a world already complete, whole, making its own sense, he believed that the artist’s intervention was necessary for another reality to be revealed. He rebelled against the tendency of every society to create categories, systems, habits, rules and codes that often revolve around abstract aspects of human life that he felt can’t be simply categorized, organized, bureaucratized or institutionalized. Schifano disliked the idea of the “absolute order of things”. He feared that with the world being complete, full of numerable and contiguous material and in need of nothing, a painter in the early 70s could invent little. He viewed “conceptual artists” as merely making inventories, lists and catalogues.

 

Schifano responded with the Paesaggi TV, (TV Landscapes) in which he transferred television pictures onto canvas using the technique of photographic emulsion. At the beginning, he used photographs he took in the United States and later a myriad of images endlessly broadcasted on television stations everywhere. From the Vietnam war to The Great Masters of Art History television series to late night porn, the images were carefully selected, photographed and printed on canvas or on paper according to the series they belonged to (i.e., the Homages, featuring artists like Picasso, Cézanne and De Chirico, or the TV Landscapes). Subsequently Schifano created a closed-loop TV studio by connecting a video camera directly onto the TV screens which allowed him to record and broadcast at the same time. Each work from the broad TV series was then painted in psychedelic colors and set in a box made of plexiglass. The subjects were stopped in time, the fast and synthetic brushstrokes sometimes limited to a few drops of color. The result was a black canvas emitting a spark of actual television transmission, a hybrid of painting, photography, sculpture and television. The frame not only served the purpose of magnifying a detail of the world but represented his obsession, his desire for a place to belong too, his love for all means of physical and mental travels, for painting, for the moving image, for television. The screened image is not simply an accommodation, the representation of a box or a mere object, but a personal eye eager to travel, urging a departure, pulling viewers into the experience of a real poetic of exploration into known territories.

 

Mario Schifano was born in Homs, Libya, on September 20, 1934. His father was an archaeologist working there for the Minister of Education and returned with the family to Rome after the end of WWII. Schifano’s first exhibition at the Galleria Appia in Rome in 1959 displayed monochrome paintings which had the premonition of the screen, the frame that would later be filled with details of corporate logos such as Coca Cola and Esso. His paintings soon evolved to an energetic mix of drippy, messy, varying surfaces evoking the unprecedented experience of the new fast-paced, post-war world. Those paintings drew the attention of critic Pierre Restany who invited him to be part of the impactful group show “Five Roman Painters,” with Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, Francesco Lo Savio and Giuseppe Uncini at Galleria La Salita. Restany also introduced Schifano’s work at Sidney Janis’s gallery in 1962 in the famous show “The New Realists,” a seminal event including a new generation of artists at the beginning of their careers, such as Dine, Indiana, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Segal, Thiebaud, Warhol and Wesselmann among others. Mario spent time in New York with Anita Pallenberg and became friends with many personalities of the New York scene like Frank O’Hara, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Gregory Corso.

 

The works of the subsequent years show Schifano’s reformist ideas on painting which led him to mingle his favorite media with music, cinema, video, photography, and testify to his inquisitiveness vis-a vis technology and science. In 1971 he shot a movie titled “Umano non Umano” (“Human Not Human”) featuring celebrities such as Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Carmelo Bene, Sandro Penna, Alberto Moravia and Rada Rassimov among others. In 1985 he painted a monumental canvas live in front of six thousands viewers in Piazza Santissima Annunziata in Florence which inaugurated a series of exhibition on the Etruscans. The same year, he married Monica and their son Marco was born. He continued an exceptional and glorious career as one of the most radical painters of post-war Italy, and as one of the most inspiring artists to new generations. During one of his trips to Brazil he created a happening in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, by painting a shanty white in protest against the city mayor’s order to paint all the favelas green in order to standardize them and make them “invisible“. Even at the end of his life, when personal computers appeared, he immediately perceived the possibilities of the World Wide Web, which extended the expressive potential, access and speed of visual arts processes. His enthusiasm was such that he created a work entitled “Fibre-Ottiche” which became the symbol of the new mass media. In 1997 he participated in “Minimalia” at Palazzo Querini Dubois in Venice. He died in Rome on January 26, 1998.

 

The exhibition is made in collaboration with the Archivio Mario Schifano: www.marioschifano.it

Works
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled Maestri del 1900 Omaggio a Picasso (Masters of the 1900 Homage to Picasso), 1978-79
    Mario Schifano, Untitled Maestri del 1900 Omaggio a Picasso (Masters of the 1900 Homage to Picasso), 1978-79
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, (Ore 22:15 maestro italiano del 1900 - Omaggio a de Chirico / 10:15 p.m., Italian Masters of the 1900 - Homage to de Chirico), 1974 - 1978
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, (Ore 22:15 maestro italiano del 1900 - Omaggio a de Chirico / 10:15 p.m., Italian Masters of the 1900 - Homage to de Chirico), 1974 - 1978
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, Paesaggio TV, 1969 - 1970
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, Paesaggio TV, 1969 - 1970
  • MARIO SCHIFANO, UNTITLED, CA. 1976
    MARIO SCHIFANO, UNTITLED, CA. 1976
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, Omaggio a Picasso, 1974-1978
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, Omaggio a Picasso, 1974-1978
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, Omaggio a Picasso, 1977
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, Omaggio a Picasso, 1977
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, NASA, 1974-1978
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, NASA, 1974-1978
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, (Ore 22:15, Maestro Italiano del 1900 - Omaggio a de Chirico / 10:15 p.m., Italian Masters of the 1900 - Homage to de Chirico), 1978-79
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, (Ore 22:15, Maestro Italiano del 1900 - Omaggio a de Chirico / 10:15 p.m., Italian Masters of the 1900 - Homage to de Chirico), 1978-79
  • Mario Schifano, Ora esatta (Exact Time), 1970s
    Mario Schifano, Ora esatta (Exact Time), 1970s
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, 1979
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, 1979
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, Paesaggio TV, 1969 - 1970
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, Paesaggio TV, 1969 - 1970
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, Ora Esatta, 1972
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, Ora Esatta, 1972
  • Mario Schifano, Untitled, Paesaggio TV, 1974-1978
    Mario Schifano, Untitled, Paesaggio TV, 1974-1978
Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: The Cult Of Television Images Tv Works From The 70S 2019
Publications
  • The Cult of Television Images (TV works from the 70s)

    The Cult of Television Images (TV works from the 70s)

    MARIO SCHIFANO 2019
    Paperback 20 pages
    Publisher: Nathalie Karg Gallery
    Dimensions: 8 x 5 1/2 in
    Read more
Back to Past exhibitions

Nathalie Karg Gallery 

 

127 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10013

Info@nathaliekarg.com

Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 Nathalie Karg Gallery
Site by Artlogic

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences