Michelangelo Pistoletto
b. 1933, Biella (Italy)
lives and works in Biella and Turin
Pistoletto is a painter, performance artist, and theorist. A founder of the Arte Povera movement he has maintained an ongoing interest in the use of humble and discarded materials. In his formative years he appropriated mirrors, painting directly on to their surfaces and is best known for his stainless steel paintings with mirror-like surfaces: “Everything in my work has come from the mirror and the idea that it reflects society and reality.”
The form of the mirror, 1975 – 1978 | mixed media
The form of the mirror, 1975 – 1978 | Location: Castle De Lovie
Michelangelo Pistoletto is a painter, performance artist and theorist. He is considered the founder of the Arte Povera movement. Pistoletto works with simple and discarded materials. Here the space and everything it contains – the visitor included – can be checked through the mirror. The artist uses mirrors to confront us with the real world. For him, destroying a mirror is a way of showing the interconnectedness of the world: “Each shard still has the same reflective quality as the whole mirror. So all mirrors, broken or intact, are connected to each other. Just as all people share the same basic DNA. I see society as a kind of broken mirror. There is no limit to the reflective power of the mirror. We have the ability to exist in the mirror, to appear and disappear. And so we see that our existence is very short. Mirrors are not the expression of my will or my feelings. They create a phenomenological effect.”