Mario Schifano: when art is propaganda – World – Arte.it

World – Dagospia promises that 2026 will be the year of Mario Schifano. Just two lines, inserted in the popular ‘gossip pills’ column by Ivan Rota on the most clicked information site in Italy, which made many people raise their antennas. On the other hand the previews of the site founded by the genius Roberto D’Agostino – a thermometer that has been recording the telluric micro-movements on the political, economic and cultural stage of the Bel Paese for decades – are always a source to be taken seriously.In the meantime, for those who want to understand more, it is worth crossing the Alps and going to Stuttgart. Here the Museum Schauwerk of Sindelfingen, a city not far from Stuttgart in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, dedicates Mario Schifano the first major retrospective of German museums and the first major European exhibition outside Italy in more than thirty years. The exhibition entitled “If I remember” and opened until June 21, 2026brings together more than eighty works including paintings, collages, drawings, photographs and films, many from private collections and presented here for the first time. It is a path that makes that possible reread Schifano as one of the sharpest figures of Italian art of the second half of the twentieth century, able to anticipate the transformation of the contemporary image long before media theory defined its mechanisms.

The exhibition opens with a cornerstone painting from the Schaufler collection, “When I remember Giacomo Balla, New York City“, created in 1964 during the artist’s American stay and exhibited at the Venice Biennale of the same year. In the title of this work, which is also the subtitle of the retrospective, the central themes of the route already coexist: the memory of futurismthe visual impact of the American metropolis and the role of the image as a dynamic, fluid and constantly changing device.

The exhibition narrative then reconstructs Schifano’s Roman origins, within the Piazza del Popolo Schoolwhere the artist received his training in the early 1960s. In those days, already Rosé coffeea group of young painters and photographers are experimenting with mixing new languages Pop art americanaItalian political culture, industrial materials and the discontinuous energy of city life. Schifano absorbs all of this in a natural way: the logos, advertising, photography, television, the news of the economic boom. His first works on wrapping paper, industrial enamel and plexiglass mark a radical approach from the image to the everyday object.

The relationship with Giacomo Ballaincorporated directly into the work “At the Balla” (1963), now kept at MOTHER of Naplesconfirms how futurism is a starting point for Schifano rather than a historical reference. The artist reinterprets the famous theme of “Little girl walks on the balcony‘Isolating the feet in movement, repeated as frames. Futuristic speed is no longer a utopia of progress: it becomes an investigation into the technical nature of the image, its disarticulation, the possibility of unraveling the gesture through the mechanisms of film and television. It is modernity that is reflected in the image, and not the other way around.

The Pop art enter this reflection as detonator. In his living room New YorkSchifano is present Andy Warhol, Frank Kline, Frank O’Haratakes part in the exhibitions of New Realists and breathe in the atmosphere of a city that is redefining the visual geography of the world. But his relationship with Pop Art is never subordinate: if Warhol freezes the image in seriality, Schifano keeps it lively, irregular, crossed by drops and imperfections. The Coca-Colas do not celebrate the logo: they show the instability, the hidden side, its function as an ideological code more than product.

The relationship between art and advertising manifests itself here with utmost clarity. Schifano quickly understands that real post-war propaganda no longer comes through political manifestos or slogans. Propaganda is an environment: brands, signs, television, the language of advertising. The work “All propaganda“(1963) makes this turning point explicitly known. The title is not ironic, but literal: everything that surrounds the artist is propaganda, because everything is an image that suggests, orients, seduces. The Coca-Cola or Esso logos, the writings, the nail polish-stained surfaces become traces of a world in which aesthetics and ideology coincide.

L’Highway of the suncelebrated in the works of the early 1960s, represents another icon of this transformation. For Schifano, it is not just a large modern infrastructure: it is the visual corridor of Italy in motion, the place where the advertising image, the brand and the consumer landscape become a natural part of the horizon. The highway is a propaganda line: a landscape that transports goods and ideas at the same speed.

A central part of the exhibition is devoted to television, the true object of Schifano’s desire and visual conflict. In the “TV landscapes” (1969–70), the artist directly photographs the television screen and transfers the frames to canvas, capturing the medium’s distortions, errors and interferences. It is a reflection on the filtered nature of reality, on the distance between event and image. The 520 photos painted for the 1993 Biennale, also present in the exhibition, they form a media diary: a decade told through the screen and reinterpreted with the brush, the pencil, the marker. A world that already arrives as an image and is remembered as an image.

From the 1980s onwards, Schifano expanded the formats and recovered a more open gesture, often compared to Transavantgarde, without abandoning the theme of visual mediation. The Monet-inspired water lilies, the large layered landscapes, the corroded horizons are always intersected by the idea that the image is a field of tension between art history and popular culture, between nature and television, between painting and technical reproduction.

The retrospective, made in collaboration with Marconi Foundation and of theMario Schifano Archivepresents a rigorous and complex picture of the artist, beyond the biographical myths that have often clouded his reading.

Two important exhibitions are being prepared for 2026 in Milan and Rome. But this long-awaited return not only concerns the museum world: also the international market has shown a growing interest in Schifano’s work in recent years. Work in 2022 Milan (1962) was awarded by Sotheby’s for 1,072,200 euros; always in 2022, in Paris and always since Sotheby’s another work – Modern era (1962) – achieved the 2.3 million euroswhich set a new world record for the artist; and already in 2013 the canvas Accident was sold by Dorotheum for 446,800 euros, a record of the time. Signs that show how Schifano’s work has long been considered, also from a collecting point of view, as a central chapter of Italian art of the second half of the twentieth century.

In this interweaving of futurism, pop art, television, brands and propaganda, the Sindelfingen exhibition presents itself as a prologue: an invitation to read Schifano not as an artist who represents the world, but as an artist who questions the way we see the world. We look forward to seeing the most famous ‘cursed’ artist of the 1960s retold soon at the Bel Paese.

Mario Schifano, All propaganda1963 – Private collection, courtesy of Gió Marconi, Milan