Upstate Diary: David Ebony's Art Picks: April '24: Olalekan Jeyifous and Mario Schifano

Mario Schifano: Germinal at Magazzino, Cold Spring, NY, through August 9, ‘24.

One of Italy’s major art stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Mario Schifano (1934-1998) was also a filmmaker, a rock-n-roll performer, and something of an international celebrity, who dated Mick Jagger’s exes, Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithful. In recent years, his art is rarely shown in the U.S., so Mario Schifano: Germinal, a survey of early works that made him famous, is something of a revelation. Organized by Magazzino director Filippo Fossati, in collaboration with the Archivio Mario Schifano and Fondazione Maurizio Calvesi in Rome, the exhibition inaugurates Magazzino’s new Robert Olnick Pavilion.

Featured here are 52 works from 1960-1970, including major paintings and photo pieces, videos, and vitrines filled with archival materials. The earliest works, on view in an upper-level gallery, demonstrate the young Schifano’s restless, creative energy. He was a multifaceted, multitalented painter with an exhilarating range of interests. He produced proto-Pop-art works, such as Propaganda Detail (1962), using fragments of the Coca-Cola logo as part of his acerbic critique of the encroachment of American consumerism in Postwar Italy. He used the Coca-Cola theme in a different way in Kokakola (1962). A large monochrome composition using the deep red of the Coca-Cola logo, it is among the show’s most striking works. Hardly a purist, Schifano’s approach to reductive art was rebellious and anarchic. With brazen panache, he allowed drips and splashes to disrupt the pristine surfaces of Kokakola, To de Chirico (1962), and other paintings of the period.