Mimmo Paladino (Paduli, 1948) is one of the main protagonists of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, known for his visual language that combines tradition and contemporaneity through painting, sculpture and installation.
In 1998 he participated in Art to Artwhere he realised The Sleepers inside the Fonte delle Fate in Poggibonsi, an evocative work that the artist donated to the city and which can still be visited today. With the Associazione Arte Continua he also developed a project in Vinci, Un piazza per Leonardo, as a tribute to Leonardo and contributed to the project Arte per la riforestazionedonating a work thanks to which it was possible to create the Neophyte Park in Prato.
In 2023, Mimmo Paladino was the protagonist of an exhibition at the UMoCA in Colle di Val d'Elsa, curated by Cai Guo-Qiangconfirming its constant dialogue with contemporary art and the territory.
His ability to interweave myth, symbol and memory has made Mimmo Paladino a leading figure on the international art scene.
Mimmo Paladino (Domenico Paladino, Paduli, 18 December 1948), is one of the leading exponents of the Transavanguardia, a movement founded by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1980, which identified a return to painting after the various conceptual currents that developed in the 1970s.
Mimmo Paladino spent his childhood in Naples and, thanks to his painter uncle, became passionate about art at an early age. Already in 1964, while visiting the Venice Biennale, Paladino was marked by the vision of the American Pop artists and shortly afterwards, starting from the common climate of the 'conceptual', he began his first phase of activity centred mainly on photography. His first solo exhibition was held in Caserta, in 1969. However, his exceptional talent as a draughtsman did not remain hidden for long: in 1977, he produced a large pastel on wall in Naples and also participated in the exhibition "International Triennial für Zeichnung"organised in Breslau. In the same year, he moved to Milan. In the second half of the 1970s, he rediscovered painting and recovered colour both in its expressive value and in the materiality of pigment. Abstract images follow one another on large canvases with strong tonal values, spatially defined by geometric structures that attract the observer.
Between 1978 and 1980, he experienced a transitional period between conceptual and figurative art: the works of this phase are predominantly monochrome paintings in primary colours to which he combines geometric elements and found objects.
His aptitude for working on the language of art and its conceptual and expressive articulations has its roots in the 1970s, when the artist was taking his first steps in the sphere of a figuration rich in symbolic elements that was to be found in all his subsequent production. Paladino thus embarked on surprising linguistic paths, experimenting with different traditional techniques: from drawing to painting, sculpture, mosaic, engraving, and even filmic images. Since 1985 he has also been experimenting with large bronze sculptures and installations, thus testing the contamination between different forms of expression. His installation in Piazza del Plebiscito of a gigantic mountain of salt is famous.
At the end of the 1990s, Paladino realised several more painting cycles, in which the most problematic aspect of his research became evident, namely the continuous questioning of the language of art: the geometry, fragmentariness, multiplicity and accumulation of signs, together with sudden caesuras and changes of register, constituted some of the leitmotifs of his work. His production also began to be known abroad thanks to a travelling exhibition in 1980, which moved from Basel to Essen and Amsterdam, as well as a solo exhibition at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe presented by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 1982 he participated in the Sidney Biennale, Zeitgeist in Berlin, Documenta 7 in Kassel and his first retrospective at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1985. In 2015 he participated in the Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion, with a space dedicated to him.
On the occasion of the exhibition Terra Italiana, held in 2014 by the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in Bologna, exhibited some of his famous works.
Some of his works are exhibited in major international museums such as: "Well of heroes” (1983), “Canto I” (1995), “Interior with tin” (1988), “Vesper"(1984) exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.