Michelangelo Pistoletto Italian, 1933

 

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began exhibiting in 1955, and in 1960 held his first solo show at the Galleria Galatea in Turin. His early paintings focused on the theme of self-portraiture.

 

Between 1961 and 1962, he developed the Mirror Paintings, which directly included the viewer’s presence and the real dimension of time within the artwork. These works also reopened the concept of perspective, overturning the Renaissance model that had been closed off by the 20th-century avant-garde. With these pieces, Pistoletto quickly gained international recognition and success, leading to solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums across Europe and the United States during the 1960s. The Mirror Paintings became the foundation of his later artistic production and theoretical reflection.

 

Between 1965 and 1966, he created a series of works titled Minus Objects, considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an artistic movement in which Pistoletto played a leading role. Starting in 1967, he began creating actions outside traditional exhibition spaces—early examples of the “creative collaboration” that he would continue to develop over the following decades, bringing together artists from various disciplines and increasingly broader sectors of society.

Between 1975 and 1976, he presented a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions titled Le Stanze at the Stein Gallery in Turin. This was the first in a series of complex, year-long projects he called “continents of time,” such as White Year (1989) and Happy Turtle (1992).

 

In 1978, he held an exhibition in which he introduced two key directions for his future work: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art Takes on Religion. In the early 1980s, he created a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, later translated into marble for his 1984 solo exhibition at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989, he developed a series of “dark” volumes titled Art of Squalor.

In the 1990s, through Progetto Arte and the founding of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas in Biella, he actively connected art with various sectors of society to inspire and promote responsible social transformation.

In 2003, he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004, the University of Turin awarded him an honorary degree in Political Science. On that occasion, he announced the most recent phase of his work, titled Third Paradise.

 

In 2007, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem, “for his consistently creative career as an artist, educator, and activist, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to visionary art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world.”

In 2010, he published the essay The Third Paradise, available in Italian, English, French, and German. In 2012, he launched Rebirth-day, the first universal day of rebirth, celebrated annually on December 21 with events around the world. In 2013, the Louvre Museum in Paris hosted his solo exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. That same year, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting in Tokyo.

In May 2015, the Universidad de las Artes in Havana awarded him an honorary degree. That same year, he created a large-scale work titled Rebirth, installed in the park of the Palace of Nations in Geneva, home of the United Nations.

In 2017, he published Omnitheism and Demopraxy. A Manifesto for the Regeneration of Society.

In 2021, the Universario was inaugurated at Cittadellarte—an exhibition space where the artist presents his most recent research. In December 2022, he published his latest book, The Formula of Creation, which retraces the key steps and evolution of his entire artistic journey and theoretical reflection.

 

Photo UniCredit Group (Andrea Segliani)