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Artists & Works
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Italian (b. 1933)
MEN WORKING ON A WHITE PANEL (1962-74)
serigraph on steel board
90.5” x 49.25”

STYLE: TOTAL ART
Michelangelo Pistoletto worked with his father as a painting restorer very early in his career, and started making figurative paintings in the fifties. In the sixties, he started to cover the canvases with metallic paint and then replaced the canvases entirely with reflective steel. Through photo-silkscreening images of people on the steel, he intended to bring the viewer and the viewer’s environment into the work, as well as question the nature of reality and representation. During the late sixties, Pistoletto was associated with ZOO, a performance that operated in Turin and other cities. Pistoletto has also made works out of discarded materials such as newspapers and rags, which aligns him with the Arte Povera movement. The artist lives and works in Turin, where he continues to use mirrors in his mixed media constructions.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS


Eleanor Heartney, ARTnews, 1/89
"Two contradictory impulses seem to be at work within the work of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. There is, in the preoccupation with mirrors and Plexiglas and the emphasis on ephemeral and discarded materials, an evident fascination with art that wants to disappear. On the other hand, the scale of many of the works...and even the elaborate frames that surround some of the artist's signature mirror works attest to a monumental ambition....The disappearing Pistoletto turns out to be the most interesting. The mirror recurred throughout the show as either a symbolic void or a doorway to looking-glass reality. The first floor...was dominated by a series of highly reflective steel plates on which Pistoletto placed tissue-paper silhouettes of ordinary people. Acting as intermediaries between our world and that of the reflection, these figures joined the viewer in gazing at his own mirror image...Always one of the most enigmatic of the Arte Povera artists, Pistoletto here was revealed to be somewhat less than the sum of his parts...perhaps nothing more can be expected by the Master of the Mirror."
Rachel Withers, Artforum, 2/00
“‘Immediately after the Mirror Pictures [1962-73] I multiplied works and styles as if I were twenty different artists at the same time,’ Pistoletto stated in 1994; but Michael Tarantino's skillfully curated Oxford show proves that Pistoletto was a hybrid creature long before he abandoned making the "Mirror Pictures." Consisting of tissue paper or silk-screened images mounted on reflective surfaces, these works tease away at painting's mimetic function, its calling-into-being of the spectator and the public nature of gallery viewing. In some, single figures or groups turn away from the viewer, shutting us out of the work, but apparently scrutinizing our reflection; in one, an unclimbable spiral stair corkscrews in and out of its reflective support; in another, a predatory dog eyes up gallery-goers' ankles. A small but vital point: These works are not made from your standard bathroom-type glass-and-metal sandwich, but polished steel--a subtly distinctive medium. Darker than a regular mirror and bearing kinks, bumps, and myriad tiny scratches, the steel mines the tension between solid support and elusive reflection more radically than Pistoletto's other (glazed) mirror works. These, to greater or lesser degrees, seemed hung up on the mirror for its own sake, ringing changes with facile elegance alone. Take the mirror-bottomed Cinque Pozzi (Five Wells; 1965-66), for example. Why make five rather than one? Why color their fiberglass sides with pretty shades of yellow and green? Pistoletto’s Halifax display, exceptionally, took a measure of flak, maybe because it too seemed a formulaic exercise--this time, more reliant on perspiration than inspiration. Pistoletto's ‘segno arte,’ his farfalle-shaped ‘art sign,’ served as ground plan for a maze of interconnected wire-mesh chambers; into these were fitted colorful, smartly finished, bow tie--shaped fabrications of everyday objects (a Ping-Pong table, a desk, twin beds, doors). The bow-tie shape rendered both "rooms" and objects gawky and perversely non-ergonomic--dystopic, even. Contrary to Arte Povera's tenet of reducing the art-life opposition, the installation seemed to mark that divide as a howling gulf. Also on display were visitors' own ‘segno arte’ designs (the best one: a very small penguin, drawn, I'm sure, by a very small visitor); video recordings of Pistoletto Foundation performances; and information on Pistoletto's Biella-based "University of Ideas," founded last year to foster utopian, interdisciplinary forms of creativity. UNIDEE's mission statement proposes the integration of all human activity ("economics, politics, science, religion, education, behavior") as the artist's prerogative. Gulp--Pistoletto's may be an intriguing, variegated, and attractive practice, but (as they say) I wouldn't want him running my local hospital.”