The exhibition “Michelangelo Pistoletto / Mario Schifano. Preistoria delle nuove immagini” curated by Lorenzo Madaro studies the time of knowledge as the primary focus of visual and conceptual thought underlying two contemporary yet in many ways very distant experiences: those of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Schifano between the 1960s and 1970s. This is a time when the television screen assumes a crucial role, and moving images forcefully become part of the relational and social dynamics of Italian families’ daily lives with the first news programs and commercials. The two artists move with casual and refined attention to fields that have, above all, a common denominator: the image. Between 1961 and 1962, Michelangelo Pistoletto began his first experiments that would later lead to the conception of mirrors, one of the most significant revolutions in the history of contemporary art of the 20th century: mirror-polished stainless steel was the most suitable material as a support for photographic images printed on tissue paper, after his initial experiments specifically concerned painting.
Mario Schifano, on the other hand, reflects on images through a sort of transit membrane of active, present, live memory. Namely, television. He photographs it because he considers it an auxiliary muse and a window onto the world. When his friend Fulvio Abbate points out during an interview that he is heir to the great tradition of Italian landscape painting, including Segantini, Schifano polemically responds that this is not the case, partly because he doesn’t know (he says this provocatively, of course) Segantini “because they don’t show him on television yet.” In this process of appropriating images, Schifano invents a new expressive and visual code. The emulsified canvases, then heroically retouched with enamels, reveal a pioneering aspect of the Roman master’s entire seminal work, which the section dedicated to Schifano focuses on in particular. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, edited by Lorenzo Madaro, published by Metilene Edizioni.
The exhibition features a selection of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirrored steels from the 1970s onward, as well as Mario Schifano’s iconic emulsion canvases, also known as “televisions” from the early 1970s. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Metilene Edizioni with a critical essay by Lorenzo Madaro, curator and professor of Contemporary Art History at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan.
To request the complete worklist of available works and purchase the exhibition catalogue, you can write to info@sangallofineart.it or via the form in the Contact page of the site.
