Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto – First artistic instructions from his father

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella on 23 June 1933. As a young man, he worked in his father’s Turin restoration workshop from 1947 to 1958 and in doing so discovered his inclination towards art. He created his first works in the 1950s in the form of self portraits and diverse figurative works. These early works soon captured the attention of the artworld and he took part in the Biennale di San Marino in 1959, followed the next year by his first solo exhibition in the Galleria Galatea in his hometown of Turin. 

The fusion of viewer and artwork

In the early 1960s, Pistoletto often used a monochrome metallic background as an early trademark for his work. As he developed, he began combining his painting with photography in the collage technique on a reflective background. He used distorting mirrors with convex or concave surfaces as the base to make the viewer appear either larger than life or tiny next to his realistically painted figures. Evident, here, is Pistoletto’s endeavour to unite his art with its surroundings and, through this fusion, to approximate the synthesis of art longed for by artists throughout the ages. He made a further step in the desired direction by using photorealistic backgrounds which he screenprinted onto polished steel plates thus further enhancing the illusion of the coincidence of image and reality. The consequence with which Pistoletto pursued his artistic course did not go unnoticed: In the mid-1960s, the US American gallerist Ileana Sonnabend became aware of his work and introduced it to a wider audience. 

Rich recognition for poor art

Michelangelo Pistoletto soon received prizes and awards for his work, including the major prize at the Biennale in São Paolo, whilst his series of early plastic works, the ‘Oggetti in meno’ brought great applause. The artist was invited to numerous exhibitions, and he was a welcome guest at Documenta in Kassel four times. At the same time, ‘Arte Povera’, ‘poor art’, stood at the centre of his work, an art which deliberately reverts to the simplest means with which to express complex relationships. Pistoletto was in his element with this and was soon classed as one of the most significant representatives of this particular art style, a style which found its namesake in the art critic Germano Celant in September 1967. For the installation ‘Venus in rags (Venere degli stracci)’, Pistoletto juxtaposed a copy of a flawless statue of Aphrodite with a mountain of old clothes; this work concisely symbolised the idea of ‘Arte Povera’ and evoked a tremendous response. For the artist, this success signified the definitive emancipation of Pop Art which had initially shaped him; Michelangelo Pistoletto had now completely arrived at ‘poor art’ and enriched it with new ideas, which he also published in writing (‘L’uomo nero’, 1970).

Michelangelo Pistoletto has been living and working in Turin since 1990.