Galleria Odyssia, New York/Rome.

Doyle, New York, 9 March 2022, lot 7.

In April 1963, a solo show of Mario Schifano opened in a gallery in Rome, named Galleria Odyssia. The space was founded in 1963 by the American-born Odyssia Skouras, daughter of a major representative in the film industry, and the Italian Federico Quadrani, whom she would marry at the end of 1964. The exhibition was a sensation and shocked the critics and friends who were familiar with the work of the artist. Until then, Schifano had painted mostly abstract paintings, consisting of monochrome, or nearly monochrome, surfaces, painted with thick layers of enamel applied to paper sheets pasted on canvas. More recently, in 1962 he started to employ the picture plane to accommodate close-up views of advertisement and street signs. The works hung on the walls of Galleria Odyssia in 1963 were blatantly figurative, and showed a wide range of subjects, such as landscapes, human figures, and street scenes. The exhibition marked a new beginning in the work of the artist and heralded the future development of his practice towards an increasingly experimental reassessment of figuration. Significantly, the show was titled Mario Schifano: Tutto, which translates as “everything.” The title referred to the utmost exuberance unfolding through the selection of paintings on view, encompassing the most diverse subjects drawn from reality and marking the transition from the lavish restraint of the monochromes.

Among the works shown at Odyssia, a large painting titled Incidente, depicting the scene of a car crash, sparked the interest of critics and commentators. The subject was most likely taken from a photograph illustrated in a magazine. Schifano often used to start to create a painting by projecting a photograph onto the picture plane. Since then, the car crash would become a recurring subject in the work of the artist for a few years. The iconography conjures up the sense of immediacy of a breaking news appearing in magazines or on TV to the eye of the viewer. By manipulating it through intensely pictorial gestures, consisting of thick layers of enamel, and an intense and bright color palette, Schifano deprived the subject of the sheer coldness of photography and turned the image into a pure painterly surface. In this respect, the car crashes painted by the artist could not be farther away from the paintings of the same subject which Andy Warhol started to realize in 1963 as well.

Warhol is especially worth-mentioning with regard to the present drawing. It is not a sketch for a painting, but one of a few early outstanding works on paper in which Schifano developed his distinctive style vis-à-vis the iconography of the car crash. In 1964, when the work was made, major events marked a turning point in the artist’s career. In December of the year before, Schifano crossed the ocean for the first time and settled in New York, where he stayed until early July 1964. By the time he came back to Italy, he had already sent three paintings to Venice, where they were exhibited at the Biennale. It was his first participation in such a major event. The artist travelled to New York to prepare the solo show which would run at the newly inaugurated American venue of Galleria Odyssia from April 7 to May 2 1964. The opening of a venue in New York represented a natural decision for Skouras and Quadrani, who had probably planned it since the inception of their business in Rome. There are a few photographs documenting the opening of the Schifano exhibition in New York, which show only a small portion of the art on view. A small catalogue was published on that occasion. A large painting representing a car crash was included among the works illustrated.

Due to the lack of information, it’s impossible to determine whether the drawing was also presented in the exhibition. Yet, it was certainly owned by Galleria Odyssia, as attested by two stamps of the gallery, one for each venue, placed on the back of the sheet. The presence of the stamp of the New York venue attests to the early American provenance of the drawing. At a close inspection, a detail helps investigate the story of the piece. Among the techniques used to create the work, the artist transferred excerpts of newspaper articles. The few legible words are clearly in Italian. In light of this, the drawing was presumably made by the artist after his return to Italy in the summer of 1964. Such an assumption would be confirmed by the two stamps of Galleria Odyssia. In fact, the gallery used to ship artworks from one venue to the other across the Atlantic ocean. The drawing was probably first located at the Rome gallery, and sent to New York at a later stage, probably before the collaboration with the artist was terminated at the end of 1965.

The present work bears witness to the ambivalent response of Schifano to the New York art scene. On one hand, it shows the extent to which the artist took the experimentation with mediums. The technique of transfer drawing is especially relevant in this respect. It consists of a process combining handmade strokes with ready-made texts and images appropriated from newspapers and magazines. The artist soaked the printed image in a solvent and then placed it face down on paper and transferred it with a series of hatch marks created by rubbing a pen across the back of the image. The technique was used by American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, whom Schifano had already met in Rome at the beginning of the 1960s, and Jim Dine, whose work he mostly admired in New York. Transferring a printed text on paper, the artist combined the gestural quality of drawing with the readymade of a mechanical image, thus responding to the fascination for ubiquitous images and mass media which was typical of the new avant-garde emerging in the early 1960s. 

On the other hand, Schifano incorporated transfer drawing within an elaborate composition, combining various techniques and mediums. Layering gouache or enamel, the artist introduced color with an extremely painterly gesture. By doing so, he asserted his nature of a pure painter and deprived the work of any implication with mediatized images and mechanical processes. Rendered as a combination of forms and colors, the image of a road accident borrowed from the press is turned into the subject of an actual painting. In this respect, Schifano went further in treating the subject of the artwork and replicated the image of the destroyed car by drawing its silhouette with graphite. Partially overlapping, the two figures expand the shape of the car on the surface of the sheet. This solution is reminiscent of Futurist compositions, such as Giacomo Balla’s depictions of cars in motion, which Schifano had just discovered before getting to New York and considered a model to reassess the tenets of figurative painting. In this respect, the drawing is closely related to a major painting realized by the artist in 1964. Titled Quadro per un avvenimento (Painting for an event), it represents a car crash scene, rendered in a similar pictorial style. By emphasizing the pictorial and gestural texture of the drawing and referencing the Italian avant-garde movement of early 20th century, Schifano created a work which defies any categorization within the labels usually defining the art at that time, such as Pop art, and confronted the towering model of American art by reviving his roots as a European and Italian painter.