Michelangelo Pistoletto

Janlet Collection, Belgium
Private Collection, Belgium (acquired from the above circa 1975)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Prix de la Critique, 1968-69

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustrations are fairly accurate, although the figure's tonality tends toward sandy beige. Condition: This works is in very good condition. There are a few very small losses to the tissue towards the bottom edge, and a tear to the brush's stick, which appears to be original.
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Executed in 1966, Uomo con scopa is a very early and highly important example of Michelangelo Pistoletto's inquiries into the possibilities of representation. The present work belongs to the artist'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. Part of a group of very few works representing fellow artists, such as Sacra conversazione (Anselmo, Zorio, Penone), from 1973, the present works depicts fellow artist from Turin Piero Gilardi while brushing the floor of his studio. Here the mirror surface acts as a threshold between the world of real images and that of reflected images, with the figure fluctuating alternatively between the physical and the pictorial spaces. The artist Gilardi acts as an in between, at once represented within the composition and mastering it from outside, blurring further the boundaries between reality and representation.

His hand-painted images of people, life-size, on paper applied to 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 look 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).

When in 1963 Ileana Sonnabend visited the exhibition at Galleria Galatea where Pistoletto showed for the first time his mirror works, she acquired the entire show and started to represent him internationally, offering his first solo exhibition in Paris and introducing him to the United States. In 1966, the year of the execution of the present work, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis dedicated a survey to his mirror paintings marking a cornerstone in Pistoletto's career. Pistoletto's appreciation in America was partly due to the pop attitude of some of his works, which was related to the artist juvenile experience in the advertising agency Armando Testa. This internationalization of the artist's career further reverbed towards other Arte Povera artists. Pistoletto was a central leading figure within the movement and a point of contact between many artists, Uomo con scopa depicting Piero Gilardi is a testament of these fruitful artistic relationships and records the fervent and creative atmosphere of those years. In 1967, with the support of Pistoletto and Piero Gilardi, and in association with Gian Enzo Sperone, the collector Marcello Levi opened in Turin the exhibition space Deposito D'Arte Presente.

Mediating between art and life, Uomo con scopa is a very rare and one of the greatest earliest examples of Michelangelo Pistoletto's oeuvre. As the artist would observe in 1962: "On the one hand the canvas, in the other the mirror – with myself in between. One eye staring at the canvas, the other at the mirror. If you gaze at them intensely enough the objects gradually become superimposed: my mirror portrait transfers itself onto the canvas while remaining in the mirror, and the canvas transfers itself to the mirror, becoming one with it." (Exhibition Catalogue, Philadelphia, Museum of Art, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, 2010-11, p. 321)