View of the exhibition, MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO, One and One makes Three, Collateral Event of the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore and Officina dell’Arte Spirituale, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore,
Venezia, 2017. Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana. Photo by: Oak Taylor-Smith
Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. In 1962 he produced his Quadri Specchianti (Mirror Paintings), which soon won him international acclaim. In 1965 and 1966 he created the Oggetti in Meno (Minus Objects), considered to be fundamental for the birth of Arte Povera. In the 1990s he founded Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, placing art in an active relationship with the various spheres of the social fabric in order to inspire and bring about a responsible transformation of society. In 1996 he participated to the first edition of Arte all’Arte, a project conceived and organized by Arte Continua (San Gimignano). In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Career Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 he received an honorary degree in Political Science from the University of Turin, and announced the most recent phase of his Third Paradise work. In 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist, whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world”. In 2011 he was artistic director of Evento 2011 in Bordeaux. In 2013 he had a solo show at the Louvre, entitled Année 1 - le paradis sur terre, and in the same year received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo. In 2014 the symbol of the Third Paradise was installed in the entrance hall of the EU Council headquarters in Brussels during the semester of the Italian presidency. In 2015 he received an honorary degree from the Universidad de las Artes in Havana. In the same year he produced a large-scale work entitled Rebirth, which was placed in the park of the UN’s office in Geneva, the Palace of Nations. In November 2016 he showed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, with a major retrospective of his past and present work. Works by Pistoletto are held in the collections of many leading modern and contemporary art museums.
The artist’s official website is: www.pistoletto.it