Mimmo Paladino
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Artist Spotlight
Mimmo Paladino, Where Ancient Worlds Sing
In the winter of 2024, the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples mounted a sweeping survey of Mimmo Paladino's work that drew thousands of visitors through rooms dense with totemic figures, archaic horses, and the haunted stillness that has defined his practice for five decades. The show served as a reminder, if any were needed, that Paladino remains one of the most consistently vital presences in contemporary Italian art. Standing before his large canvases, viewers feel the pull of something older than painting itself, a sense that the marks being made are less invention than… Continue reading
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Artists in conversation
Francesco Clemente
As a fellow Transavanguardia artist, Clemente shares Paladino's commitment to symbolic figurative imagery and archaic spiritual references drawn from non-Western and ancient Mediterranean sources. Both painters work with muted and earthy palettes to evoke mythic memory and ritualistic experience.
Anselm Kiefer
Kiefer similarly fuses Neo-Expressionist painting with heavy symbolic and mythological content using textured surfaces, earth toned materials, and archaic imagery referencing collective cultural memory. Both artists integrate sculpture and mixed media installations that carry allegorical and historical weight.
Georg Baselitz
Baselitz shares Paladino's Neo-Expressionist figuration, rough gestural surfaces, and interest in primordial totemic forms rooted in ancient and folk imagery. Both artists reassert the importance of the painted and sculpted figure against the dominance of abstraction and conceptual art.
Artists who inspired them
Joseph Beuys
Beuys's use of ritualistic objects, shamanistic symbolism, and raw natural materials as vehicles for mythic meaning deeply informed Paladino's approach to sculpture and installation. His idea of art as a transformative and quasi-sacred act resonates throughout Paladino's totemic figures and theatrical environments.
Pablo Picasso
Picasso's synthesis of primitive African and Iberian masks with modern figuration provided a foundational model for Paladino's integration of archaic visual forms into contemporary painting and sculpture. His willingness to draw on non-Western sources to disrupt classical Western representation was a key precedent for Paladino.
Alberto Burri
Burri's radical emphasis on raw materials, textured and scarred surfaces, and the expressive power of matter itself was a strong Italian precedent for Paladino's own material richness and surface intensity. His approach to the physicality of the artwork as a bearer of existential meaning shaped an entire generation of Italian artists including Paladino.