American Icons and Early Work

Mimmo Rotella: American Icons and Early Work is an exhibition catalogue published by Knoedler & Company, New York, in 2009, with an essay by Meredith Malone. It pairs Rotella's later decollage portraits of American pop-culture figures with photographs and works from earlier in his career.

Rotella made his name in Rome in the 1950s tearing layers of found advertising and film posters off city walls and remounting the torn fragments as decollage, a technique that ran parallel to and predated Pop Art's use of mass-media imagery. The American Icons works apply that same torn-poster method to Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and other American stars, images already circulating as icons before Rotella cut into them. The early work included here shows the more experimental, less immediately marketable material that preceded that signature style.

Rotella co-founded the Nouveau Realisme movement in Paris in 1960 alongside Yves Klein and Arman, and Germano Celant's later catalogues raisonnés established him as a central, if belatedly recognized, figure of postwar European art. This Knoedler catalogue, published three years after Rotella's death in 2006, situates his most collectible late portraits against the rougher work that made them possible.