Michelangelo Pistoletto

Galleria Christian Stein, Turin 

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2004

Colour: The colour in the catalogue is fairly accurate although the tonality of the screen print is warmer in the original, and the illustration fails to convey the reflectivity of the polished steel. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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"The mirror isn't a wall, it's always in the future, all that is to happen tomorrow is already in it."

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

Executed in 1976, Michelangelo Pistoletto's Untitled is a consummate example from the artist's iconic Quadri Specchianti, or Mirror Paintings. The most important and instantly recognisable series from Pistoletto’s distinguished oeuvre, the Mirror Paintings innovatively examine art's ability to mirror the dynamism and mutability of life. In the present work, a meditative couple appears to engage in a conversation that exists beyond the confines of the reflective, polished steel ground. Synchronously incorporating both the quotidian materialism of Arte Povera, with its mirror-like surface, and the mass-produced quality of Pop Art, with the silkscreened figures, in Untitled Pistoletto forges an entirely unique aesthetic that enmeshes 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 come together causing two spectral worlds to collide. Indeed, it is through this extraordinary manipulation of both concept and material that the very notions of time, space and representation are brought to light and scrutinised. As Pistoletto lyrically explained, "The mirror isn't a wall, it's always in the future, all that is to happen tomorrow is already in it" (Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Barcelona, Museo d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 2000, p. 25).

Frustrated with the imitative relationship between traditional painting and reality, Pistoletto first experimented with a reflective ground in 1956 with a series of self-portraits on a shiny surface. The artist refined this process in the early 1960s by substituting the glossy ground for a highly polished stainless steel one, onto which he pasted finely painted photographic images that were laid on tissue paper. It was only in 1971, however, that Pistoletto fully perfected his technique by introducing silkscreened photographs. Elucidating the genesis of the Mirror Paintings, Pistoletto expounded: “I decided to make a better reflection with another material: polished stainless steel. There was objectivity in the reflected reality that told me how to realise the figure. I could no longer paint the figure as I did before: that was a pictorial solution, but it needed a photographic solution…” (Michelangelo Pistoletto quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Mirror of Judgement, 2011, p. 17). Having mastered his technique, the present work was executed during the apogee of the Mirror Paintings corpus. As such, Untitled is paradigmatic of that ambiguous threshold between art and reality that is so characteristic of the artist’s most important works.

As exquisitely demonstrated in the present work, Pistoletto appropriates and playfully destabilises the traditional art historical trope of the mirror. Notably explored in Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, whereby the role of the mirror was to examine and unravel the distortive illusionism of perspective, Pistoletto masterfully uses the language of trompe-l’oeil to entirely subvert it. By replacing the canvas support and wooden stretcher for polished and burnished steel in Untitled, the viewer's image is directly implicated into the two-dimensional plane of the 'painting'; a dialogue that not only questions the role of representation, perspective and illusionism across the history of painting, but also enters into spatio-temporal conceptual realms in a fascinatingly novel manner. As succinctly summarised by Gabriele Guercio, the integration of fiction and reality experienced in Untitled makes manifest the fact 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).