“The Apple” – Screenprint by Michelangelo Pistoletto

Screen printing on mirror in polished stainless steel, edition 80/80.

MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO was born in Biella in 1933. He began exhibiting in 1955 and in 1960 he held his first solo show at the Galatea Gallery in Turin. His first pictorial production is characterized by a research on self-portrait, experimenting different techniques recalling Fontana, Jean du Buffet and Pollock. Through this research he accomplishes two works on black emaled canvas, which later lead him to his mirror paintings in 1961. In the two-year period 1961-1962 he arrives at the creation of mirror paintings, which directly include the presence of the viewer, the real dimension of time in the work and also reopen the perspective, overturning the Renaissance one closed by the avant-garde of the twentieth century. With these works Pistoletto quickly achieved international recognition and success, which led him to carry out, already during the 1960s, personal exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The mirror paintings will form the basis of his subsequent artistic production and theoretical reflection.
Between 1965 and 1966 he produced a set of works entitled Minus Objects, considered fundamental for the birth of Arte Povera, an artistic movement of which Pistoletto is the animator and protagonist. Starting from 1967 he carried out, outside the traditional exhibition spaces, actions that represent the first manifestations of that “creative collaboration” that Pistoletto will develop over the following decades, bringing together artists from different disciplines and increasingly wider sectors of society. Between 1975 and 1976 he created a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, Le Stanze, at the Stein Gallery in Turin, the first of a series of complex works organized over a year, called “continents of time”, as White Year (1989 ) and Happy Turtle (1992).
In 1978 he held an exhibition during which he presented two fundamental directions of his future research and artistic production: Division and multiplication of the mirror and Art dives in religion. At the beginning of the eighties he created a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for the personal exhibition of 1984 at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created the series of “dark” volumes called Arte dello squallore (Art of Squalor). During the nineties, with Progetto Arte and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he puts art in an active relationship with the different areas of the social context in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation of society. 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 this occasion the artist announces what constitutes the most recent phase of his work, called Terzo Paradiso. In 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem, “for his constantly creative career as an artist, educator and activator, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to premonitory art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world”.
In 2010 he is the author of the essay Il Terzo Paradiso, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2012 he promoted the Rebirth-day, the first universal day of rebirth, celebrated every year on 21th December with initiatives carried out in different places around the world. In 2013 the Louvre Museum in Paris hosts his solo exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. In the same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo.
In May 2015, the Universidad de las Artes de Havana awarded him an honorary degree. In the same year he created a large-scale work, entitled Rebirth, located in the park of the Palace of Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the United Nations Organization.
In 2017 his text Hominitism and Demopraxia was published. Manifesto for a regeneration of society. Between 2018 and 2020 the activity of the Third Paradise is further intensified, in particular through the development of an international network of Embassies and Forums. In these same years he is also particularly active in various countries of Latin America with personal exhibitions and various initiatives related to the Third Paradise.