Michelangelo Pistoletto

Pistoletto started working in art in the 1960s, after learning painting restoration (1947-58) from his father and working as a commercial artist with Armando Testa.
His first solo exhibition, shown at Galleria Galatea of Turin, was held in 1960.
Thanks to his later works, he can be considered as one of the main Italian interpreters of the “new objectivity”, he was the first to use photographs of objects and people on mirror-polished stainless steel surfaces or plexiglass (1963).
His art has always been based on the relationship between reality and appearance, involving both the environment and the spectator. At the end of the 1960s he joined the Arte povera (literally Poor art) movement, creating sculptures by using different materials, from wires to paper, from rags to concrete, but also plaster, marble and more.
He was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna in the last decade of last century, while in 1998 he founded in Biella, his native city, the multicultural centre Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto.