Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in 1933 in Biella, Italy. He lives and works in Turin, Italy.

He is leading figure in the development of Arte Povera and Conceptual art. Pistoletto is best known for his “mirror paintings” beginning in the 1960s, which first used grounds of metallic paint on canvas before rejecting canvas entirely for polished steel.

Pistoletto’s life-size, photo-silkscreened images of people atop highly reflective surfaces integrate the environment and viewer into the work. In his “minus objects,” sculptures that explore how objects become artworks through the ideas they express, Pistoletto uses “poor” materials as a liberation from the traditional art system, as in his 1967 work Venus of the Rags, a copy of the classical figure set against a mound of old clothes and rags.