Mimmo Rotella is a significant figure in Italian postwar art, renowned for the collages he made from torn advertising posters. Born in Italy in 1918, he studied art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples before moving to Rome in 1945. After first experimenting with figurative painting, he developed an abstract and geometrical style. His first solo exhibition was held in 1951 at the Galleria Chiurazzi and later that same year he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, which enabled him to travel to the US, where he studied at Kansas City University.

Rotella’s return to Rome in 1953 marked his rejection of easel painting and the development of his distinctive artistic practice; the art of décollage. However, the present work is one of his many sovrapitture—paintings over intact or partial posters. Rotella's sovrapitture represent a new stage in the evolution of his signature décollage technique, begun in the 1950s, whereby the artist ripped worn posters from the outdoor walls of Rome, tore and sliced them further in his studio and then reassembled or collaged them onto prepared canvases, or in this instance, zinc. Pursuing his investigation into abstract art by re-appropriating the designated intellectual frameworks of the posters’ content, his abstract compositions introduced new visual dialogues that aimed to highlight aesthetic values such as the vitality of colours, materiality and compositional conception.

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