Description

STIMA VALUE INDEX – MARIO SCHIFANO

Mario Schifano (20 September 1934, Khoms, Libya – 26 January 1998, Rome, Italy) was an Italian painter and collagist of the Postmodern tradition. He also achieved some renown as a film-maker and rock musician.

He is considered to be one of the most significant and pre-eminent artists of Italian postmodernism. His work was exhibited in the famous 1962 “New Realists” show at the Sidney Janis Gallery with other young Pop art and Nouveau réalisme innovators, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He became part of the core group of artists comprising the “Scuola di Piazza del Popolo” alongside Franco Angeli and Tano Festa. Renowned as a prolific and exuberant artist, he nonetheless struggled with a lifelong drug habit that earned him the label maledetto, or “cursed”.

Schifano had a relationship with Anita Pallenberg in 1963, and with Marianne Faithfull in 1969.

He had a connection to The Rolling Stones beyond his relationships with Pallenberg and Faithfull: Keith Richards and Mick Jagger gave cameo performances in a film he directed, `Umano non Umano’ (1968); and he was even the inspiration for a Rolling Stones song, `Monkey Man’, on their 1969 album `Let It Bleed’.