VOENA

About the Presentation
Voena will present work by Mimmo Rotella in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. The presentation will focus on Rotella's works from the 1960s, years that witnessed the artist’s consolidation and expansion of his décollage and retro d’affiche techniques, moving away from the Art Informel style - he began to experiment with imagery that resonated with the new trends and icons of consumer society. 

Works by Rotella shown at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 were compared to Pop Art, offering a uniquely Italian vision of art for the booming commercial world of the ‘60s, marrying the legacy of European avant-garde with American-style mass popular culture. This selection seeks to attend to the importance of Rotella's artistic methodologies around this time.

About the Gallery

At the heart of VOENA's identity is an enduring conviction: art, at the moment of its creation, was always contemporary. This is the principle by which the gallery works, and it shapes every aspect of the programme. The boundaries between past and present, Old Master and living artist, are not fixed, they are permeable, and it is precisely in that dialogue that meaning is made.
 
The gallery's programme spans Italian Old and Modern Masters and their wider influence, alongside a curated selection of contemporary international artists through VOENA Contemporary.
 
The Old Master and Modern side is defined by museum-quality research and presentation. We are drawn to artists who, though rooted in their own time, feel urgently alive today, whose work transcends the moment of its making and speaks with undiminished force across the centuries. This is neither nostalgia nor mere connoisseurship: it is a belief that the greatest art was never simply of its time, and that rediscovering it demands the same rigour and seriousness that the finest institutions bring to their collections.
 
This vision finds a natural extension in Il Libro, VOENA's publication dedicated to Italian art, which approaches the canon with the same seriousness and scholarship that defines the gallery's exhibition programme. Through in-depth essays, archival research, and critical reassessment, Il Libro affirms that rigorous engagement with the past is not antiquarian but essential, a living conversation that shapes how we look at and understand art today.
 
VOENA Contemporary is built on the same foundations: a deep respect for art history and a belief that the most compelling work of our time is that which knows where it comes from. VOENA presents artists whose practices are rooted in sustained research, engaging with the history of materials, with philosophical and cultural traditions, and with the long arc of image-making across civilisations and whose work achieves a visual authority that speaks across periods. Working across different mediums, these are artists from around the world whose enquiry is as rigorous as it is visceral. The selection reflects a conviction that contemporary art, at its strongest, does not break from the past but enters into dialogue with it, adding new voices to a conversation that stretches back centuries. At VOENA, the Old Master and the contemporary artist are never far apart.