Mimmo Rotella is born in Catanzaro on 7th October 1918. He graduates at Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and in 1945 he moves to Rome. In 1951 he sets up his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Chiurazzi in Rome. After a reflective period about painting ways and new painting instruments, he produced his first Décollages. In these works he glues onto canvas parts of advertisements that he has ripped off city walls. In the Sixties he creates some works dedicated to celebrities of Hollywood. In the early eighties he produces the Sovrapitture, painting directly onto advertisements that cover illustration below. They are showed at Marconi Studio in Milan and at Denis René Gallery in Paris (1981). In addition, he sets up many important exhibitions of Nouveaux Réalistes and a lot of national and international personal expositions. He dies in Milan on 9th January 2006.