Michelangelo Pistoletto
° 1933
Born in Biella (IT), lives in Biella (IT).
Michelangelo Pistoletto is associated with Arte Povera. In the 1960s, he defines a new kind of monumentality by combining rags and 'worthless' materials with forms from classical antiquity. From 1962 on, he starts using mirrors and gold, silver or copper as a reflective background for cut-out photographs of life-size human figures. These superpositions fuse past and present into a single image, putting the very idea of representation to the test, whereas the division and multiplication of reflections express Pistoletto's vision on the continued development of the universe as a reflective process. In recent years, the mirrors are often shown without the extra layer of figuration, and sometimes they are intentionally broken. Pistoletto has created an oeuvre that is well known for its formal complexity, as well as for its social ambition.
