The apple made whole again

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in 1933 in Biella, Italy. He currently lives and works in Turin. Even though he is the leading figure in the development of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, from the beginning of the 1960s Pistoletto is best known for his “mirror paintings”. He first used grounds of metallic paint on canvas, before rejecting this type of support for polished steel. Pistoletto integrates the environment and the viewer into his works, thanks to life-size photo-silkscreened images of people atop reflective surfaces.                                                                     In his “minus objects,” which are sculptures that explore how objects become artworks through the ideas they express, Pistoletto uses “poor” materials as a liberation from the traditional art system: Venus of the Rags (1967), which is a copy of the classical figure set against a mound of old clothes and rags, is an example.