M HKA Ensembles

Print, 650 x 500 mm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. M00036a).

Michelangelo Pistoletto lives and works in Biella.  His introduction to art came at home where, from 1947, he worked in the restoration- and painting studio of his father. In the second-half of the Fifties, he started making his own art: self-portraits painted on a shiny monochrome background.  The notion of 'reflection' has ever been a recurrent motif in his oeuvre, and continues to be so.

This is certainly the case for his mirror paintings (commencing in 1962), where he uses stainless steel plates to glue his figures to.  Mirror and plexiglas would later replace the steel plates, and he used life-size photographs or would directly silkscreen figures onto various supports, like here.  By way of the mirror-image that the viewer perceives, a dialogue is initiated between the world of the viewer and that of the artist – the Other.  For Pistoletto, the use of a photograph is important because it is his way to comprehensively represent time.  In these works, the present – in the form of the mirror-image of the viewer and his/her surroundings – is set in relation to an image fixed in the past.