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Michelangelo Pistoletto Gambe - Uomo e Donna 2007 silkscreen on stainless steel 98 1/2 x 49 1/4 in. (250.2 x 125.1 cm.) This work is unique.
Provenance Cardi Black Box, Milan Exhibited Madrid, Galería Elvira González, Michelangelo Pistoletto April 11 - May 17, 2012 Catalogue Essay The career of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto is as long as it is brilliant. One of the most important and innovative artists to have emerged out of post-war Italy, Pistoletto acquired international recognition in the 1960s as one of the leading figures of Arte Povera, an Italian movement whose process-oriented works incorporating everyday, earthy materials prefigured the Post Minimalism of the United States. Since then, Pistoletto has participated in twelve Venice Biennales (receiving the Biennale’s lifetime achievement award in 2003), four Documentas in Kassel, and numerous exhibitions at major museums all over the world (MoMA, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, London, etc.). But it was Pistoletto’s works from the Mirror Paintings series that first distinguished the artist. To this day, they are perhaps his most iconic pieces. Gambe - Uomo e Donna, 2007, is a clear continuation of this series in which Pistoletto places a nearly photographic, life-sized painted image over a reflective steel plate. As a result, the viewer before the work is reflected by the work or, rather, incorporated into the work’s imaginary world. Thus open to perpetual change, these mirror paintings have recently been posited by eminent curator Carlos Basualdo as forerunners of key contemporary art trends, such as relational aesthetics and interactive art. At the same time, these mirror pieces completely literalize the perspectival effects that masters of the Italian Renaissance had mathematically constructed and perfected for hundreds of years. Gambe - Uomo e Donna, 2007, therefore points to both the past and the future of art, while incorporating the present through its play with its immediate surroundings. To the artist, the mirror pieces also have an important relationship to one of the most significant moments of his career: his Arte Povera years. “Arte Povera,” Pistoletto explicates, “is…to present the simple material of life and to show how this material reacts in itself. In my mirror paintings, for example, I don’t produce any effect, any sign or any form that is personal, or is a personal affirmation. There is no affirmation in the mirror paintings, they are just phenomenological works in which time shows itself.” (Michelangelo Pistoletto in, interview with Julian Stallabrass, Tate, no. 25 Summer 2001, pp. 42-9). Read More