Fran's Favorite Fotos
Theme: Focused
While hardly a household name in the United States, artist Michelangelo Pistoletto belongs to the generation who effected a radical transformation in 20th-century art by extending its parameters.
In the mid-1950s Pistoletto was inspired to place figures on thin sheets of highly polished stainless steel. These "mirror paintings" are really tinted tracings (on tissue-thin paper) of life size photographs. The mirrored surfaces supply background and context; when you look at one, you become part of the painting. (as I have in my photo)
As the artist explains, these works not only extend space, they blend past and present. The figures, pasted to the foreground, are immutably past, but the mirrored context is always the present.
Theme: Focused
While hardly a household name in the United States, artist Michelangelo Pistoletto belongs to the generation who effected a radical transformation in 20th-century art by extending its parameters.
In the mid-1950s Pistoletto was inspired to place figures on thin sheets of highly polished stainless steel. These "mirror paintings" are really tinted tracings (on tissue-thin paper) of life size photographs. The mirrored surfaces supply background and context; when you look at one, you become part of the painting. (as I have in my photo)
As the artist explains, these works not only extend space, they blend past and present. The figures, pasted to the foreground, are immutably past, but the mirrored context is always the present.