Michelangelo Pistoletto

Galleria Il Milione, Milan
Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the family of the present owner in 1964

Düsseldorf, Kunst aus rheinischem Privatbesitz, 1967, no. 295
Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein, 5 Italiener: Bonalumi, Ceroli, Manzoni, Munari, Pistoletto, 1969, no. 30
Darmstadt, Kunsthalle, Menschenbilder, 1968, no. 66, illustrated
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1969
Recklinghausen, Ruhrfestspiele, Zeitgenossen, 1970, no. 159
Wuppertal, Von der Heydt Museum, Fünf Sammler unserer Zeit, 1971, no. 121, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is richer and deeper in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the reflective quality of the mirror. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are scattered hairline scratches to the mirrored surface. There are isolated minute spots of discolouration and light wear in places to the figures. There are two fine white rub marks running vertically along the bottom right corner of the male character's black jacket, and three minute spots of retouching in the left side of the jacket. The extreme tips of the two left corners are slightly worn with associated minute losses and a 3cm. scratch to the lower left corner.
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The present work belongs to Michelangelo Pistoletto's Quadri Specchianti or Mirror Paintings, the most important series within the artist's oeuvre in which he explores art's ability to mirror the dynamism and mutability of life. Dissatisfied with the traditional manner in which painting was merely reproducing reality, he discovered the potential of reflection as a means of creating a meaningful image, projecting himself and the viewer through time into the same composition. Starting in 1961 Pistoletto applied cut-out paper tissue onto polished stainless steel before moving onto images silk-screened onto mirrors, which allowed for greater definition and reflection. In doing so he achieves one of the most powerful examinations of the relationship between artist and viewer in the history of Western art.

 

His photosilkscreened images of people, life-size, on reflective surfaces were intended both to integrate the environment and the viewer into his work, and to question the nature of reality representation. Providing a poetic chronology of his oeuvre, Pistoletto's series of mirror works looks into the past and the future simultaneously, eluding traditional classification as they continue to reflect an ever changing world around them. The viewer's space is interwoven with the artist's work and vision becomes an integral and dynamic part of the composition. As Pistoletto recalls, "In traditional painting, representation and drawing covers the entire surface. This is a static aspect that has come down through the years as a univocal signal. It can correspond to the figure that I place on the surfaces of the mirror painting, a fixed signal, an image 'snapped' at a certain moment. But in my mirror paintings the image co-exists with every present moment... In my works the current time of the future is already included in the continuous mobility of the images, in the constantly renewed present of the reflection." (Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center, Pistoletto, Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1988, p. 31)

 

Executed in 1963, Femmes en Vert et deux Personnages is a very early and highly important example of Pistoletto's inquiries into the possibilities of representation, and one of the very few works to include the artist himself within the composition. Here the mirror surface acts as a threshold between the world of real images and that of reflected images, with the figures fluctuating alternatively between the physical and the pictorial spaces. The artist acts as an in between, at once represented within the composition and mastering it from outside, blurring further the boundaries between reality and representation.