The art exhibition of Michelangelo Pistoletto will open on Saturday at the Old Oil Mill of Elefsina as part of the Aeschylia Festival 2014. The concept of the exhibition is inspired by the idea of ‘The Third Paradise’, i.e. the overcoming of the current worldwide existing conflict between the two polarities of nature and artifice.
The Third Paradise is symbolically represented by a reconfiguration of the mathematical infinity sign. In the “New Infinity Sign” three circles are drawn: the two opposite circles signify nature and artifice; the middle one is the conjunction of the two and represents the generative womb of the Third Paradise.
Pistoletto’s work will include in situ constructions, works which will be placed in the buildings of Old Oil Mill in Elefsina. Manuela Gandini, Italian art critic and writer, is the curator of the exhibition.
The 81 year-old Italian artist ‘the living legend of Arte Povera” will attend the inauguration of his first exhibition in Greece.
Biography
Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began to exhibit his work in 1955 and in 1960 he had his first solo show at Galleria Galatea in Turin. In the two-year period 1961-1962 made the first Mirror Paintings, which directly include the viewer and real time in the work, and open up perspective, reversing the Renaissance perspective that had been closed by the twentieth-century avant-gardes. These works quickly brought Pistoletto international acclaim, leading, in the sixties, to one-man shows in important galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings are the foundation of his subsequent artistic output and theoretical thought.
In 1965 and 1966 he produced a set of works entitled Minus Objects, considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement of which Pistoletto was an animating force and a protagonist. In 1967 he began to work outside traditional exhibition spaces, with the first instances of that “creative collaboration” he developed over the following decades by bringing together artists from different disciplines and diverse sectors of society. In 1975-76 he presented a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, Le Stanze, at the same gallery in Turin. This was the first of a series of complex, year-long works called “time continents”. Others are White Year (1989) and Happy Turtle (1992).
In 1978, in a show in Turin, Pistoletto defined two main directions his future artwork would take: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art Takes On Religion. In the early eighties he made a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for his solo show in 1984 at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created the series of “dark” volumes called Art of Squalor. During the nineties, with Project Art and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he brought art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003 he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004 the University of Turin awarded him a laurea honoris causa in Political Science. On that occasion the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise. In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “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.”
He is the Artistic Director of Evento 2011 – L’art pour une ré-évolution urbaine in Bordeaux.
In 2012 he launches Rebirth-day, the First Worldwide Day of Rebirth, an initiative which generated over a hundred events all over the world on 21st December.
In 2013, from April to September, his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre takes place at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In the same year, in Tokyo, he received the Praemium Imperiale award for painting.
