Self-Portrait in the Vases of the Third Paradise, 2019, serigraph on supermirror stainless steel, 35 7/16 × 27 9/16 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella 1933)
He trained in the studio of his father Ettore and enrolled in the graphics school run by Armando Testa. In 1955 he exhibited several self-portraits, and in 1960 held his first solo show. In 1961-62 he created Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings). From the mid-1960s onwards, he was one of the main exponents of Arte Povera. In 1975-76 he completed the first of his Continenti di tempo (Time Continents). In 1978, he stayed in Berlin, and in 1981 exhibited a group of sculptures in rigid polyurethane in New York. From 1991 to 2000, he taught at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy. In 2002, he was artistic director of the Turin International Youth Art Biennial and in 2011 of the Bordeaux Biennial. In 2004, he presented Terzo paradiso (Third Paradise), which in 2007 took the form of a multimedia work in progress and in 2014 was installed in the atrium of the EU Council headquarters in Brussels. In 2015, he created the work Rebirth in the UN headquarters’ park in Geneva. In 2010 he published Il Terzo Paradiso and in 2017 Ominiteismo e demopraxia. Manifesto per una rigenerazione della società (Hominitheism and Demopraxis. Manifesto for a Regeneration of Society). He exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1966), Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1976), Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1978), MoMA PS1 in New York (1988), GNAM in Rome (1990), GAM in Turin (2000), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010), MAXXI in Rome (2011) and the Louvre in Paris (2013). He took part in 13 editions of the Venice Biennale and in four editions of Documenta in Kassel. Some of his works are in MoMA, Neue Nationalgalerie, the Uffizi, the Tate, GNAM and MAXXI, Reina Sofía, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. He received the Medal of Merit for Culture and Art in 2002, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2003, an honorary degree in Political Science from the University of Turin in 2004 and from the Universidad de las Artes in Havana in 2015, the Wolf Prize in Jerusalem in 2007, the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit from the Italian Republic in 2012, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 2013 and an honorary degree from the Brera Academy in 2016.
It is one of Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings, his best-known works, which earned him his first international awards. The series, which began in 1962, is the culmination of an intense investigation of self-portraiture carried out by the artist in the second half of the 1950s, but it is also the foundation of his subsequent artistic research and of his theoretical thought, as Pistoletto has consistently returned to the Mirror Paintings to explore their meaning and develop their implications. The essential features of the Mirror Paintings are: the inclusion of the viewer and the surrounding environment in the work, making it “the self-portrait of the world”; the conjunction of opposite poles (static/dynamic, surface/depth, absolute/relative, etc.), starting with the interaction between the still, photographic image and what takes place in the virtual space generated by the mirror surface. The work is no longer an illusory window open onto the world, as in the conception of painting that started with Renaissance perspective. Instead, the Mirror Painting offers a double perspective directed both towards the front and the back: through this opening, the exhibition space extends into the virtual space of the work. The most striking feature of Self-Portrait in the Vases of the Third Paradise lies in the photographic image placed on the mirror surface, which in turn contains a reflected image. This solution was first introduced by the artist in a Mirror Painting from 2008, Self-Portrait in Vases, which featured an image of the artist reflected on the surface of a vase. In this work, Pistoletto returned to a 1973 exhibition titled Father and Son, in collaboration with his father, who had created several still lifes containing objects, including vases, on whose surface the artist himself was reflected in the act of painting. Here, Pistoletto’s image is reflected in three vases, which are themselves part of a 2009 work, composed of 61 platinum ceramic vases arranged to form the symbol of the Third Paradise, the collective and participatory work begun in 2003. (Archivio Pistoletto)