Michelangelo Pistoletto
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Michelangelo Pistoletto
Italian artist, born in Biella in Piedmont. From 1947to1958 he worked with his father, a picture restorer, and also did advertising work. He had his first one-man show at the Galleria Galatea, Turin, in 1960, and in 1962 he began making the ‘mirror paintings’ for which he is best known. In these he used life-size cut-out photographs of people, usually shown in arrested action, which he pasted on to thin sheets of polished steel. The spectator sees his or her own moving image reflected in the steel alongside the photographic image. They were originally associated with Pop art, but Pistoletto describes them as ‘phenomenological works in which time shows itself’. This is clearer today than in the 1960s, when the modern viewer mingles with pictures from the past. Pistoletto deliberately rejected the option of continuing with a device which had achieved great success with collectors (Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were both buyers), and subsequently worked in a wide variety of media and styles. He radically opposed the notion of the ‘signature style’ in the oggetti in meno (minus objects) he made in 1965. These were first only shown to a small group of friends, but alongside the contemporary works of Pino Pascali now appear as important early examples of Arte Povera. Some of the pieces openly invited spectator participation. Pistoletto saw Arte Povera as concerned not just with poor materials but with defining a model for Italy independent of the pressures from the axis represented by America, the Vatican, and the Mafia on one side and Soviet-inspired Communism on the other. The combination of these two ideas is present in his best-known work, Venus of the Rags (1967/remade 1974, Tate). A marble sculpture of Venus is placed against the wall and surrounded by a colourful array of fragments of fabric. This unforgettable image is open to different levels of interpretation. Germano Celant saw the rags as representative of ‘the confusion and multivalence of marginalized people…perverts, convicts, racial minorities, women and prisoners’. However, the turning to the wall could also be related to Pistoletto's preoccupation with reflection and its absence. There was also a strongly performative element to his work. In 1966 he rolled a large ball covered in newspaper through the streets of Turin; it picked up dirt on the way. The work was called Mappomondo. He has set up a Pistoletto Foundation in Biella. Established in an old textile factory, this is conceived not so much as a museum for the artist's work but as a centre for research into the relationship between art and society.
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Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto (born 25 June 1933) is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
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Biography
Pistoletto was born at Biella.
From 1947 until 1958, Pistoletto worked in his father’s restoration workshop in Turin. In the 1950s, he started painting figurative works and self-portraits. In 1959, he participated in the Biennale di San Marino. In the following year, he had his first solo exhibition in the Galleria Galatea in Turin. In the beginning of the 1960s, Pistoletto started painting figurative works and self-portraits which he painted on a monochrome, metallic background. Later on, he combined painting with photography using collage techniques on reflective backgrounds. In doing so, he sometimes used concave or convex distorting mirrors, which made the observer appear too large or too small in comparison with the realistic-looking painted figures. Eventually, he switched over to printing photorealistic scenes on steel plates polished to a high finish. He did that using the screen-printing method which made the observer almost completely melt in with what was depicted.[1] In the mid-1960s, gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend brought him into contact with an international audience.
In 1965/1966, he produced the series of works Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), which belongs to Pistoletto’s early sculptural works. In 1966, Pistoletto had his first solo exhibition in the USA, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 1967, his work was awarded first prize in the Biennale de São Paolo. In the same year, Pistoletto started focusing on performance, video art and theatre. He founded an action art group, called "Zoo Group", which gave several performances between 1968 and 1970. These took place in the studio, public buildings or on the streets of Turin or other large cities. As was already the case with Pistoletto’s 2-dimensional and sculptural works, the aim was to display the unity of art and everyday life.[2] Pistoletto is represented by the Simon Lee Gallery in London and the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.
Arte Povera
Michelangelo Pistoletto began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. In the later sixties he began bringing together rags with casts of omnipresent classical statuary of Italy to break down the hierarchies of "art" and common things. An art of impoverished materials is certainly one aspect of the definition of Arte Povera. In his 1967 Muretto di straci (Rag Wall) Pistoletto makes an exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric. The work received a lot of feedback: Pistoletto, who started under the American influence of "post-pop art" and photorealism, was soon listed by gallery owners and critics in the catalogues as a significant representative of the novel, mostly Italian trend of the Arte Povera. Against the background of the 1968 student riots, Pistoletto withdrew his participation in the Venice Biennale. In the following years, he dealt with conceptual ideas, which he presented in the book L'uomo nero (1970). In 1974, he nearly completely withdrew from the art scene: he took an exam as a skiing instructor and spent most of his time in the mountains of San Sicario. At the end of the 1970s, he produced sculptures, heads, and torsos using polyurethane and marble. In doing so, he was a recipient of antique artifacts and he furthermore pursued other performance and theatre projects–including those in the USA in Athens, Atlanta, and San Francisco. At the beginning of the 1980s, he presented theatre works, such as Anno Uno (March 1981) in the Teatro Quirino in Rome. Since 1990, Pistoletto has been living and working in Turin.
Cittadelarte – Fondazione Pistoletto
In 1994, Michelangelo Pistoletto proclaimed his programme Progetto Arte, whose aim was the creative and social economic unification of all parts of human existence; in a narrower sense, the systematic combination of all achievements and knowledge of civilisation with aspects of art (e.g. fashion, theatre, design, etc.). In 1996, he founded the art city Cittadelarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in a discarded textile factory near Biella, as a centre and "laboratory", supporting and researching creative resources, and producing innovative ideas and possibilities. The Cittadelarte is divided into different Uffici/Offices (work, education, communications, art, nutrition, politics, spirituality, and economics), which exchange with each other within an intermedial network. Although it is conceived as a closed system, transparency towards the outside world is an important aspect of the Cittadelarte.[3]
Selected works
- 1976/92: Scaffale (Bookcase) – metal and enamel, various realisations, Tate Gallery
- 1962/82: Uomo in piedi (Standing Man) – serigraphy on polished steel, Tate Gallery
- 1967/74: Venere degli stracci (Venus of the Rags) – sculpture and textiles, Tate Gallery
- 1965/66: Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects) – various objects, Guggenheim Museum
- 1997: L'ala die Krems. (The Wing of Krems), Krems an der Donau[4]
Bibliography
- Der schwarze Mann. Die unerträgliche Seite. Transl. into German by Johannes Schlebrügge, Pakesch und Schlebrügge, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-85160-004-5
- Michelangelo Pistoletto. Actar, 2000, ISBN 84-95273-28-4
References
- Thomas Deecke: Michelangelo Pistoletto. Den Spiegel vorhalten. Künstler - Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Ausgabe 11, Munich 1990 ISSN 0934-1730
- Helmut Friedel: Michelangelo Pistoletto. Memoria Intelligentia Praevidentia. Katalog zur Ausstellung 1996 im Lenbachhaus München, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1996, ISBN 3-89322-838-1
- Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Minus Artist. Hopefulmonster Editore, 1988, ISBN 88-7757-020-2
- Nike Bätzner: Arte povera. Zwischen Erinnerung und Ereignis: Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis. Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg, 2000, ISBN 3-933096-34-0
References
- ^ A similar approach can be found in the work of US Pop artist James Rosenquist.
- ^ Guggenheim Collection - Artist - Pistoletto - Biography
- ^ http://www.cittadellarte.it/citta2005/eng/cittadellarte/cittadellarte.html (Visited November 18, 2007)
- ^ publicart.at Susanne Neuburger: Der Flügel von Krems (The Wing of Krems - in German)
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Michelangelo Pistoletto |
- Michelangelo Pistoletto website
- Documentation of recent exhibitions by Michelangelo Pistoletto
- Michelangelo Pistoletto at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
- Luhring Augustine: Xavier Hufkens
- Guggenheim Collection: Michelangelo Pistoletto Biography
- DesignBoom feature (02/2008)
- Artforum review (02/2000)
- Pan Wendt discusses Pistoletto's art collective Lo Zoo in Fillip
- Simon Lee Gallery, London.
- This article incorporates information from this version of the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.
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