Michelangelo Pistoletto: Scaffali

Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present works from celebrated Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s most recent series of mirror paintings, in which he directs his attention towards the subject of scaffali, or shelves. This will be the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Pistoletto is widely recognised as one of the most influential contemporary artists of his generation and a central figure within the Arte Povera movement. From early in his five-decade career the mirrored surface has been an instrumental element of his practice. Initiated in 1962, Pistoletto’s signature mirror paintings use the reflective picture plane to draw both viewer and environment into the work, playing with traditional notions of the painted image as a fixed moment in time. With an emphasis on the performative, Pistoletto’s work is profoundly concerned with the active relationship between artwork and spectator, and the creation of a virtual space in which art and life seamlessly interact. ‘The mirror paintings’, he wrote in 1969, ‘could not live without an audience. They were created and re-created according to the movement and to the interventions they reproduced’.