Lugano
Castello di Rivoli presents a major exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933) on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Set up in the spaces of the Manica Lunga, the artist’s project Many of one reinvents the orthogonal architecture of the Manica Lunga, transforming it into an astonishing harmonious tangle, an irregular and free urban device through which to collect and reread all of his art in a gigantic self-portrait that functions as the map of an ideal City of the future.
“Pistoletto is one of the most multifaceted, innovative, creative and auroral figures in contemporary art globally,” says Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. “Already active in the second half of the 20th century, he is capable of re-imagining the world in the 21st century through his ‘formula of creation’, under the banner of a new trinamic balance between the natural and the artificial that he calls the Third Paradise.”
Pistoletto is among the artists who have redefined the concept of art since the mid-1960s through Arte Povera. As early as the first half of the 1950s, the artist questioned the concept of personal identity and embarked on the path of the self-portrait as an emblematic expression of his thought according to which the individual subject comes to life in relation to others, becoming a plural subject. Since 1962 he has been producing mirror paintings, in which the beholder and the world enter the work. For Pistoletto, the overcoming of the borders marked by the purely pictorial dimension represented the opening up of a landscape to the contemporaneity of existence.
“Conceived for the Manica Lunga,” says Marcella Beccaria, “Many of one is a city of Art structured as a walkable architecture and composed of 29 Uffizi or rooms. Designed as open and interconnected spaces, the Uffizi include metaverse, art, science, philosophy, law, architecture, communication, politics, ecology, surveillance, sport, mathematics, spirituality, religion, mythology, education, nurture, symbology, cosmology, design, burial, history, urbanism, fashion, space, writing, health, information technology, nature. The 29 Uffizi exhibits the structure that, according to the artist, underpins civil and social life by proposing a vast network of interrelationships and a dynamic condition aimed at breaking down walls and separations’.