In the elegant atmosphere of Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City, Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the world’s best-known Italian artists who has succeeded in revolutionizing the attitudes of the language of art and breaking down barriers between disciplines.
The event, organized in collaboration with Galleria Continua, offers an overview of the artist’s works, divided into historical, recent and unpublished, thus re-proposing the foundational reasons for an aesthetic and conceptual vision from the 1960s to the present.
Artistically active since the early postwar period, Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in 1933 in Biella, Italy. The roots of his research are in his images painted on tissue paper and applied to mirrored steel plates (1961-62) that climbed the ranks of the international art market.
IMAGES Courtesy © by Lévy Gorvy Dayan
In 1999, through the Cittadellarte Foundation, built in a former factory in Biella, he laid the groundwork to create a multicultural and multi-sector structure that, like a mirror, reflects the existing, to help produce responsible change in society through imagination.
Entitled “To Step Beyond,” the New York exhibition foreshadows itself as a journey evoking the themes of perception, time, memory, cosmic and mirror phenomenology with which the artist has always grappled: “If art is the mirror of life, then I am a creator of mirrors.”
In the gallery spaces, the painting on aluminum and canvas “Gray Man’s Back” (1961) or the silkscreen print on steel “Waiting No. 1” (1973) dialogue perfectly with the recent mirror paintings “QR Code Possession” (2023) and the immersive installation “Color and Light” created especially for the exhibition. A perturbing continuity, full of variations, changes of scale and evocations, where the mirror, symbol and anti-symbol of (in)certainties, identity, uniqueness and unity, remains fundamental in Pistoletto’s research and object repertoire.
The exhibition ending March 29, 2025, will be an opportunity for all to delve into the complexity of an artist who, from the very beginning, found ways to make the fragile depths of social living accessible to all.
The article New York hosts Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibition comes from TheNewyorker.
