Michelangelo Pistoletto

Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1971

Rome, Parcheggio Villa Borghese, Contemporanea, 1973-4
New York, P.S.1 Museum, Pistoletto: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1988, p. 63, illustrated
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1990, p. 111, illustrated in colour
Rome, Accademia di Francia, Incontri... dalla Collezione di Graziella Lonardi Buontempo, 2003, p. 131, illustrated

Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, MAXXI - Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo; Milan, PAC - Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Ugo Mulas. La scena dell'arte, 2007-8, p. 299, illustrated in installation
Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, MAXXI - Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo; Philadelphia, Museum of Art, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, 2010-2, p. 163, no. 151, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey the reflective quality of the mirrored surface. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The work has been originally nailed to the support at the bottom corners. Close inspection reveals a few superficial and unobtrusive handling marks towards the edges.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"The mirror isn't a wall, it's always in the future, all that is to happen tomorrow is already in it."

The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Barcelona, Museo d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 2000, p. 25

Executed in 1970, Michelangelo Pistoletto's Lei e Lui con Gli Occhiali Neri, is a magnificent example from the artist's iconic Quadri Specchianti, or Mirror Paintings. The most significant corpus of Pistoletto's pre-eminent oeuvre, these works explore and examine art's ability to mirror the dynamism and mutability of life. Simultaneously straddling the material concerns of the Italian Arte Povera movement while invoking the mass produced aesthetic and every-day ephemera of Pop Art, Pistoletto forged a unique and groundbreaking corpus of works that enmeshed the exalted and immortal dimension of the artwork with the changeable and transitory conditions of existence. Contained within the two dimensional plane of Pistoletto's 'painting', the viewer and the intermediary figures concurrently conflate and two spectral worlds collide: through the reflected surface of the artwork and via a remarkable manipulation of concept and material, the very concepts of time, space and representation are invoked and scrutinised.

As masterfully highlighted by the present work, Pistoletto usurps the traditional illusionistic trope of the mirror in art history. As consummately broached in Velazquez' Las Meninas and Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere, whereby the role of the mirror in painting was utilised to unpick perspective and visual or hierarchical preconceptions as feats of distortive illusionism, Pistoletto takes this trompe l-oeil effect and turns it on its head. By replacing the canvas support and wooden  stretcher for polished and burnished steel, the viewer's image is directly implicated into the two dimensional plane of the 'painting'; a dialogue that not only scrutinises the role of representation, perspective and illusionism across the history of painting, but also ventures in the conceptual realm of both time and space.

Dissatisfied with the traditional manner in which painting was merely reproducing reality, Pistoletto discovered the potential of reflection as a means of creating a meaningful image, projecting himself and the viewer through time into the same composition. Having first experimented with surface reflection in 1956 with a series of self-portraits on varnished and shiny backgrounds, Pistoletto refined his method from 1961 instead using highly polished stainless steel onto which he pasted finely painted photo-realistic images. Painted after a photographic source onto delicate tissue, the static representation of Pistoletto's painted figures and their fusion with the metallic surface compounds a representational dichotomy between the inert painted image and the constant evolution of mirrored reflections. In these remarkable works polished steel becomes the ambiguous threshold between the realm of the artwork and the space of the viewer to engender a concrete artistic expression of reality. Pistoletto explains: "All elements in the picture are of such a degree of reality that the result cannot be a mere hypothesis. The result is real. One has to seek out the point where the three dimensions, and stability and movement, converge: it is to be found in the contour which marks the interface between the silhouettes and the mirror surface... The third dimension is revealed in this very line, through the sense of distance which we feel between ourselves, the silhouette and our own reflected image" (Michelangelo Pistoletto in: Exhibition Catalogue, Genoa, La Bertesca Gallery, The Minus Objects, 1966, n.p.).

Indeed, these mirrored works open up a choreography of the self, providing a means for the viewer to see themselves reflected while shifting and moving in conversation with the life-size perpetually static painted counterparts. As outlined by Gabriele Guercio, the comingling of fiction and reality inherent to Pistoletto's mise-en-scéne "rendered manifest that one's life occurs within at least two spaces, if not more, and that one always stands at the threshold, neither here nor beyond" (Gabriele Guercio, 'A Community of Non-All' in: Exhibition Catalogue, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, 2010-11, p. 130).

Our reality enters the closed and limited arena of painting, reflecting the futurist Carlo Carra's prediction of 1910 that "we will put the viewer inside the painting." The placement of overlapping objects is arranged in such a way that we both see and are actually in Pistoletto's vision; one characterised by its perfect balance of attracting, engaging, involving, holding and releasing the viewer both metaphorically and in practice. Crossing the boundary between art and life, Pistoletto's employment of the mirror's reflective surface acts as a metaphor for the idea of nature and thereby sanctioning the removal of simulated reality. The represented image comes from the mirror itself, and in so doing, arouses our awareness of the illusion of painting. With his iconic Mirror Paintings Pistoletto achieves one of the most powerful examinations of the relationship between the art work and the viewer in the history of Western art.