Press release
MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO
Quarta Generazione
2 March – 29 July 2022
opening 2 March 2022 | h. 16 – 20
In 1985 Michelangelo Pistoletto produced, in collaboration with the Giorgio Persano Gallery, a series of works in polyurethane, covered with canvas and painted in dark colors, called by the artist the “Art of squalor”. Two important works from this period are re-presented in the spaces of the gallery’s inner garden in Via Stampatori 4 – Turin, with the aim of bringing attention back to the artist’s “fourth generation” and celebrating the break with the system it brought about.
A number of painted sculptures, called “volumes”, belong to this cycle. With these, Pistoletto sought to investigate the relationship between painting and sculpture, in their relation to space, the dimensions they occupy and their surface. As in the mirror paintings, the key theme is the dualism between abstraction and image, concept and reality. Despite the pictorial intervention, the sculptures are bearers of a “volume” which breaks with the two-dimensionality of the image. In this case, the decision to paint the volumes in dark tones, brings the works to absorb reality, rather than depict it.
Interesting too is the choice of using a non-noble material, like polyurethane or wood, which Pistoletto introduced into his work from the 1980s onwards, both because this material made it possible to work rapidly, and for the inherent consistency with the notion of loss of monumentality of the artwork, with the principles of Arte Povera and of an “Art of squalor”. Indeed, the works seem to give value to all those elements that traditionally do not attain the dignity of the art object, placing them in dialogue with the themes of emptiness, absence and – precisely – squalor.
“Art of squalor, parasitic art, of mortification. A surface of desolation, a dull surface. A repulsive art that represents nothing. […] A mass of shredded ideas, shredded objects, mangled, macerated, soaked and compressed meanings. Fragments of tools and concepts: stellar dust, cosmic foam, meteoric lava, sidereal ice.” Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1985.
Artworks of exhibitions
