Mimmo Paladino (born in Paduli on 18 December 1948) is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker. He is a leading name in the Transvanguardia artistic movement and one of the many European artists to revive Expressionism in the 1980s.
Biography Paladino was born on 18 December 1948 in Paduli, Campania, but grew up and trained in Benevento, Italy. From 1964 until 1968, he attended Liceo Artistico di Benevento.
He made his debut in 1968 with a solo exhibition at the Galleria Carolina in Portici in Naples. Here he was presented by Achille Bonito Oliva, who was also present for the monographic show at Enzo Cannaviello's Studio Oggetto in Caserta the following year. However, we need to go back to 1964 to find the first major date in his artistic education. This was when, still a schoolboy, he visited the 32nd Venice Biennale and, in particular, the U.S. Pavilion, where he discovered the American Pop artists. In the early 1970s, his approach shifted towards conceptual art and photography, but by the mid-decade his painting had acquired considerable importance and appeared in a manifesto work, Silently, I Am Retiring to Paint a Picture, which was shown in a room in which also the walls were painted. The aim was clearly a return to painting, as the principal place of narration. This was not to recapture the aspirations of the fifties and sixties, which in Italy reflected a painting tradition linked to pre-war artistic research, but rather to make a break with the influences that repudiated painting in the strictest sense, on which he intervened with a series of circular linguistic and semiotic interactions.
In the late seventies, Paladino moved to Milan, where he later taught artistic disciplines at the Liceo school, while also working on his art. In 1977 came his first collaboration with Lucio Amelio, the historic gallery owner in Naples, and two years later he put on his first exhibition with another key gallerist, Emilio Mazzoli of Modena, for whom he made his first book-object – En-De-Re – in 1980. This was indeed another crucial year, for it was when he put on his first solo exhibition in New York (where he had just taken up temporary residence), in two different galleries – those of Maria Goodman and Annina Nosei. International interest in his work and in that of other young Italians was growing, and in 1980 a traveling exhibition took works by Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Paladino, together with two other artists, Luigi Ontani and Ernesto Tatafiore, to three of the most important museums in Europe. It was also the year of the 39th Venice Biennale, where Harald Szeemann and Achille Bonito Oliva curated the Aperto section, choosing some of the artists who were to make their mark on the art scene for many years to come. It was here that Transavanguardia became more firmly established, with its theoretical structure being published the following year. The arrival of the young Italian painters was seen by many as a breath of fresh air and a key exhibition like Zeitgeist, in Berlin, certainly indicated their progress, with German-speaking countries as the first to promote their work. Paladino's career, like those of his colleagues, has included considerable collaboration with artists, intellectuals and musicians, and yet, more than others, Paladino has always managed to appear with a form of creativity that is inquisitive and open, but always personal. He goes beyond the purely pictorial and, ever since 1983, he has strayed into sculpture (his first work, Closed Garden, is now at Castello di Rivoli) and engraving. However, his basic conception is always pictorial, even when three-dimensional, as in the case of It Will Have No Title, with the use of geometrical elements applied to the environment, the first result of which came in 1995. Painting, sculpture and engraving were the three media that most inspired his style throughout the following years and one might well assume that this is the ‘‘eminence” that Danto refers to, since it was clear that – like few other artists of the twentieth century – Paladino always revealed a different ambition in each discipline. In 1988 the critic Giovanni Carandente entrusted him with the main gallery in the Italian Pavilion at the 43rd Venice Biennale. Here Paladino showed an installation in which the management of space – created in part by a pictorial approach to sculpture – was of great impact. This type of approach returned in the early nineties in the Hortus Conclusus in Benevento, a garden in which architecture, the environment and objects all combined to form the work. These creations, which had a mysterious, “alchemical” air about them, emerged like apparitions, as constant epiphanies. This is an aspect that I find constantly in the work of this artist, who in 1994 was the first Italian to exhibit in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Here the views formed a complementary backdrop to the works on show, and this became a constant feature of all his urban projects. The Mountain of Salt dates from 1990. Originally created in Gibellina, it “appeared” in the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples in 1995 and later, in 2011, in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, when the city dedicated a major retrospective to him on the piano nobile of the Palazzo Reale. The nineties was a time of great experimentation and it is no coincidence that the Mountain became its symbol. The new millennium, as well as bringing a large number of exhibitions in which he was the protagonist or a guest, also brought the use of video. In 2006 Paladino made his short feature film Quijote, devoted to the work by Cervantes. Presented at the Venice Film Festival, the movie captures the essence of the art of the masterpiece in a highly imaginative series of evocations, sounds and inventions. Great literature is an underlying thread that, over the years, has led him to illustrate the icons of world culture, such as Tristes Tropiques, Ulysses, the Homeric poems, Pinocchio and, of course, Don Quixote. Paladino was back behind the camera in 2013 to film Labyrinthus for the fourth centenary of the death of the madrigal composer Gesualdo da Venosa. Here too, his collaboration with the world of music goes back a long way, with numerous mises en scène for opera houses, the creation of opera posters for Maestro Riccardo Muti and requests for music for his installations, as was the case in 1999 with Brian Eno for Sleepers, in London and then, in 2008, for the Ara Pacis in Rome.
In 2013, Paladino was commissioned to create a monumental installation for Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. The temporary installation incorporated blocks of marble and bronze sculptures and measured approximately 263 × 164 feet, forming a large cross-shaped structure through which members of the public could move. Paladino has exhibited and published his work in various contexts. His practice includes painting, sculpture, public installations, book projects, and museum exhibitions, often combining multiple artistic elements within a single project. His work was also presented at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Paladino was made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London on 26 May 1999.
His work is in many public museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Personal life Mimmo Paladino is married to Imma, and has one daughter and three grandchildren. He now lives in Rome and Milan, and Paduli but still has a studio in the little town near Benevento.
Timeline 1948 Born 18 December in Paduli, near Benevento, east of Naples
1964 Visits the Venice Biennale where the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the American Pavilion makes a strong impression, revealing to him the ‘reality of art’
1968 Completes his studies at the Liceo artistico di Benevento and within a year has participated in a group show in Naples. His early work uses photo-based imagery as well as showing an awareness of conceptual art: ‘…what I was really looking for was images. The frozen art, made with such a cold medium as the camera, certainly didn’t come naturally, and above all, I couldn’t have kept on making art along such a one-way track that excluded new possibilities’
Solo exhibition at the Galleria Carolina, Portici
1969 Solo exhibition at Enzo Cannaviello's Studio Oggetto, Caserta
1973 Begins combining images in mixed media, building up a complex iconography that takes account of ‘a terrible mixture of messages from cultures, strangely opposed and divergent, though mixed together’
1977 Paints a seminal work that marks a shift towards painting at odds with current avant-garde practice: ‘I have always thought of my work as something which is on a borderline with risk. Even my first painting with an image came out in a moment when something of this kind was totally outside the idea of painting; and the title, not by chance, was Silence, I am retiring to paint a picture’
Shows a large mural in tempera with Galleria Lucio Amelio in Naples
The same year he moves to Milan
1978 First visit to New York
1980 Invited by the Neapolitan critic Achille Bonito Oliva to show in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, together with Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Nicola De Maria.
Publication of the book-object EN DE RE in collaboration with Bonito Oliva (Emilio Mazzoli, Modena)
Begins experimenting with etching, aquatint, lino-cuts and xylography
1981 Participates in A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, a major exhibition that is shown the following year at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, under the title Zeitgeist
A major solo exhibition of drawings from the previous five years is organised by the Kunstmuseum, Basel. It travels to the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, the Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, and the Groninger Museum, Groningen, and launches Paladino as an international artistWorks on the first of four projects with the New York printmakers Harlan & Weaver
1982 Participates in the Sydney Biennale and in Documenta 7, Kassel
Realises his first sculpture in bronze, Giardino chiuso
Makes the first of numerous visits to Brazil where his father is living
1984 Builds a house and studio in Paduli, near Benevento. From now on, divides his time between Paduli and his apartment in Milan
Shows five recent works at the Newport Harbor Museum as part of Il Modo Italiano, a survey of recent Italian art organized by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art and held in several venues
1985 First retrospective exhibition is held at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Realises the Pietre, the first of several series of standing figures in white stone
1988 The Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale devotes a large central space to a massive sculptural work consisting of enigmatic graphic symbols attached to the walls and a group of bronze figures
1989 Designs a Swatch watch which is produced in an edition of 100. ‘The idea was not to decorate a watch, but to design time. My Swatch is like a humorous vanitas, a poetic symbol of passing time that was industrially manufactured’
1990 Commissioned by the theatre director Elio De Capitani to create a set for an open-air performance of the opera La sposa di Messina, based on Friedrich Schiller's tragic drama, and staged at Gibellina in Sicily as part of the Orestiadi festival. Paladino devises a sculpture-environment to be seen by moonlight. It consists of a Zen garden made of raked gravel dominated by a mountain of salt from which emerge the charred forms of 30 wooden horses
1991 A major exhibition opens in Prague at the Belvedere, the royal castle that has been restored for the occasion; shows a cycle of seven new canvases inspired by the history of Prague, nine bronze torsos and works on paper. A sculpture of a fallen horse exhibited in a nearby piazza is removed after objections by a local bishop.