Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933) - "L'Acquario"

Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Aquarium. A four-color offset lithographic reproduction of the original work by Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Aquarium, expressly made for Bolaffiarte. 5000 numbered copies bear the artist’s autograph signature (our copy 2578). Dry stamp Bolaffi. Rare to find paired with the magazine. In excellent condition. Auction with no reserve!!!!

Michelangelo Olivero Pistoletto (Biella, June 25, 1933) is an Italian artist, painter and sculptor, an active promoter and protagonist of the Arte Povera movement.
Only child of Livia Fila (1896-1971) and of the painter Ettore Olivero Pistoletto (1898-1984), who had created a series of paintings on the wool art history for Zegna of Biella.[1] A year after his birth the family moved to Turin, where his father had opened a studio for restoration. From childhood he frequented his father’s studio, opposed to the trends of modern art, where he learned the basics of drawing and painting, the most recent restoration techniques; he also approached the art world through Sunday visits to the Galleria Sabauda in Turin.

He began in 1947 as an apprentice in his father’s workshop, a restorer of paintings, with whom he collaborated until 1958: it is here that he came into contact with Western painting tradition, medieval and Renaissance art.

In 1953 he collaborated with Armando Testa, founder of Italy’s first advertising school. He directed this advertising institute until 1958. Advertising would influence his early research. Even in these years he began his creative activity in the field of painting, expressed also through numerous self-portraits, on canvases prepared with metallic priming and later on surfaces of polished steel.

His exposure to Turin exhibition spaces, such as Luciano Pistoi’s Galleria Notizie, Galleria La bussola, the International Center for Aesthetic Research, and the Civic Museum, where critic Luigi Carluccio curated a series of exhibitions focused on the Italy-France comparison, with artists such as Georges Mathieu and Hans Hartung, together with exposure to Lucio Fontana’s works seen in Turin at the “Arte in vetrina” review, leads him to reflect on contemporary art, on the opposition between abstract and figurative.

He exhibited his first work, a self-portrait, in 1955 at the Circolo degli Artisti di Torino. Between 1962 and 1966 the subjects of the “mirror paintings” were cut and immobilized in a snapshot, in an atmosphere of suspension that was even more pronounced. In 1963, the year he exhibited for the second time at Galleria Galatea, he was mistakenly associated by Ileana Sonnabend with pop artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In Pistoletto there is always a lack of identification between art and consumer objects and goods, which is found in American Pop Art and the removal of the artist’s hand typical, for example, of Warhol.

In 1964 the shift from Mirror Paintings to Plexiglas takes place, transparent resin slabs on which the artist paints or places photographs of objects already used in the early works, allowing a glimpse of the surface beneath. Light meets the void of the work and the fullness of reality, of the environment. The distinction between image and reality becomes ambiguous, the represented objects transform into real objects, relating to the passage of time and the changing things.

“The works I make [...] are objects through which I free myself from something - they are not constructions but liberations - I do not consider them extra objects but objects less, in the sense that they carry with them a perceptual experience definitively exteriorized”

(Carlos Basualdo, Writings of Michelangelo Pistoletto, in Michelangelo Pistoletto. From one to many. 1956-1974, Electa, 2011, p. 344.)

Arte Povera
With the Objects in the Less and the early works with rags, such as three Rag Venuses (1967), will catalyze the birth of Arte Povera.

In 1967 he privately published a theoretical reflection on the evolution of his work, titled The Last Famous Words: he questions the ambiguity in art between “a mental and abstract part and a concrete and physical part,” between the literal presence of the artist in the mirror and his intellectual presence in painting. Within the spaces of the Galleria Christian Stein in Turin, from October 1975 to September 1976, Pistoletto carried out 12 consecutive exhibitions, one per month. The Rooms, which arise from three environments (three rooms connected by three doors aligned on the same axis), act as a kind of architectural telescope, reflecting each other in the same space.

and politics in his manifesto Omniteism and Demopraxia of 2017. Omniteism places both people and religious institutions in front of themselves for a judgment that does not come from above, but puts each one of us directly before our responsibilities. Responsibility thus becomes the practice that regulates and unites all parts of society. Demopraxia — a concept and term conceived in 2012 by Paolo Naldini, director of Cittadellarte — replaces the term ‘power’, from the Greek krátos (from which democracy derives), with the term ‘practice’, from the Greek praxis (from which demopraxia derives), in order to reach with the demo-practice where one could not reach with the imposition of demo-power. The aim is still to stimulate social responsibility through art and,

Between 1979 and 1980 Pistoletto launched a wide creative collaboration that involved several U.S. cities with a series of solo exhibitions and installations in museums, galleries and public spaces. Pistoletto worked on a dense program of collaborations with numerous artists, local music and theater groups. In Atlanta he invited theater director and actor Lionello Gennero, Enrico Rava, a jazz musician, and the American composer Morton Feldman, assisted by Maria Pioppi.

The Creative Collaboration continued in several cities over the two-year period: New York, Los Angeles and Athens. Parallelly it was also in Italy, in Bologna and Corniglia, where Pistoletto coordinated and took part in a series of street performances in the city together with those artists who had collaborated with him at

At the Persano Gallery in Turin, in June 1985, he exhibited a group of works consisting of volume and surfaces, using large blocks of polyurethane used for sculptures, covered with canvas and painted, with dark and somber colors, and to which the artist, in the catalog text, also refers with the expression "art of squalor." In photographic reproduction, Pistoletto presents, on large wooden panels, the images of some of these works exhibited in different places in the previous years to highlight the union of painting and sculpture through the two-dimensionality of photography. It is a production of a series of works by the artist and the invitation to others to realize their own Arte Sign.
The exhibition was held in France in 1993 simultaneously in several cities including Rochechouart, Thiers and Vassivière.

Pistoletto’s Arte Sign is a figure formed by the intersection of two triangles, ideally inscribing a human figure with raised arms and legs apart. It is precisely this form that Pistoletto uses as the basic module for creating other works in different materials. As an example of Arte Signs produced by others, one can recall The Wing of Krems, a permanent sculpture, created in Krems in 1997, consisting of luminous panels each containing the Arte Sign of a Krems resident.

“Normally a sign is imposed for everyone, a religious sign, a political sign, an advertising sign, the sign of a product, signs invade the world, but only the artist has created the personal sign. Now it is time that others also become self-responsible (…) Each person having their own sign has the key to entering the door of art, a door that leads both to the reserved, intimate, personal space and to the space of social encounters.”[3]

“Project Art is based on the idea that art is the most sensitive and integral expression of thought, and it is time for the artist to take on the responsibility of putting in communication every other human activity, from economy to politics, from science to religion, from education to behavior, in short all the issues of the social fabric.”[4]

Pistoletto develops an innovative program to break down the traditional barriers between different artistic disciplines. The goals of the project are to involve, in addition to artists from diverse fields, also political figures. The ideas, stated in the manifesto, are synthesized and concretized in the exhibition in Pistoia (from November 1995 to February 1996) at Palazzo Fabroni, divided into 16 thematic rooms corresponding to the different aspects articulated within the Project: Philosophy, Architecture, Politics, Literature, Economics, Food, Market, Religion, Design, Science, Art, Information, Music, Meetings, Attire and Theater.

Subsequently, from September 1996 to February 1997, at the Pecci Museum in Prato he curated the exhibition Habitus, Clothes, Living in which the rooms are frequented by artists, designers, sociologists. Moreover, in various places in the city, initiatives were organized aiming to involve the public.