Artists & Works

STYLE: Neo-expressionism,
Transavantgardia

A painter and a sculptor, as well as a printmaker, Mimmo Paladino is associated with a group of Italian artists who came to prominence in the 1980s. Known as the Transavantgardia, the group includes Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, and Sandro Chia. Paladino's imagery is often allegorical, including live and dead men, skulls and skeletons, masks without expression, and animals. Paladino means "champion" in Italian.

The work shares in many of the concerns of the Neo-expressionists: anxiety, agitation, expressive mark-making, all all evident. In addition, Paladino sometimes limits his palette, often more interested in sculptural and painterly effects. His paintings often contain mixed media elements, including bronze, silver, and gold objects which often refer to otherworldly subject matter.

Paladino's has been shown in solo exhibitions worldwide and is in the collections of many major museums. He lives and works in Italy.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Bonita Achille Oliva, Flash Art, 7/80, "Transavantgardia"
"The missing pride of the conceptual artist's work, the elitist behavior of the artist who was playing on the amazement of the public and on the element of surprise, are being replaced by the humility of creative, accessible, and real work. Art becomes again direct expression, leaving behind it the feeling of guilt for being permanent, which was a symptom of contact with the world. The artist becomes again maniacal and Mannerist in his own mania. The opposition moved toward the perspective of a possible reconciliation with the world. The dialectic was the symptom of an ideology that thought it could continue using its old tricks in the face of a henceforth impregnable reality. The young artists have ceased to practice such tricks because there is no longer any direction toward which they can steer the creative experience . . . The Transavantgarde is born precisely from this condition, unfolding like a fan, open not only toward a mythical future but also toward the renewal of a minor past, namely, a past removed from the rhetoric of the great traditions. This "minority" is one more value that is recovered by the new art mentality, which moves with feminine gestures and with a feminine and subterranean sensitivity. Transavantgarde artists who practice this other-than-art feeling belong to this generation and are part of a great creative expansion."

Marina Vaize, The Times [London], 5/1/98
" The wildly successful Italian Mimmo Paladino (b 1948) is showing new sculptures, paintings and collages (Waddington, until May 21), his first London Exhibition for five years. Large paintings combine encaustic (pigment in a wax medium), acrylic and oil, and sometimes are festooned and punctuated with attached bronze objects; copper and iron are also used, and there are bronze and iron sculptures. The most common figurative element is a mask; sometimes bodies are suggested in drawn outline, dogs and horses appear, and squiggles like fragments of a written language. Paladino seems to be creating his own myth, with his everyman an attenuated, emaciated wanderer. Everything depends, as always, on the artist's ability to sustain the interest of the viewer. The result here is a little empty, more pomp than circumstance, surface not substance. ."