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Lot Essay
Depicting three leading lights of the Arte Povera movement—Giuseppe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo and Gilberto Zorio—Tre Uomini in Grigio (Three Men in Grey) (1974) is a major work from Michelangelo Pistoletto’s career-defining series of Quadri specchianti, or mirror paintings. Consisting of painted or silkscreened images applied to sheets of reflective stainless steel, these works quite literally bring the viewer into the picture. Rather than a fixed composition, the painting becomes an active interface between art and life. Portraying his three poveristi colleagues in black and white, Pistoletto captures a distinct cultural and social moment. He also calls upon art history, echoing the Renaissance genre of the Sacra conversazione or ‘sacred conversation’, where attendant saints gather around the Madonna and Child. While the viewer can visually join the three artists in the mirror’s surface, their discussion remains out of reach: different planes of reality, time and space come together without touching.
Tre Uomini in Grigio is one of a number of mirror paintings in which Pistoletto portrayed his artist friends. His motifs were enlarged from photographs before being laid down on steel. The photographs, including the group portrait that was the basis for the present work, were taken by his friend and collaborator Paolo Mussat Sartor, who was closely associated with the Arte Povera scene. Pistoletto also used this image for two other mirror paintings, Sacra conversazione. Anselmo, Zorio, Penone (1974) and Sacra conversazione. Penone, Zorio, Anselmo (1975). These works show the men full-length and in colour, and—as the titles imply—mirrored so that they appear in a different order from left to right. Tre Uomini in Grigio represents another development. Pistoletto renders the trio in greyscale and alters their positions so that Penone has his back to his companions. For the earliest mirror paintings, which he began making in 1962, he had hand-copied the figures in painted tissue paper. By 1973 he had codified a four-colour silkscreen process, which allowed him to explore different compositional and chromatic permutations.
Pistoletto, Penone, Anselmo and Zorio all rose to prominence during the 1960s as part of the Arte Povera generation. The term was coined by the critic Germano Celant in 1967 to describe a new avant-garde tendency in Italy. These artists were diverse in their approaches but broadly united by their use of ‘poor’ or non-traditional materials. Critical of commercialism, they engaged with the stuff of everyday life, stripping back art’s trappings to explore essential principles of time, matter and energy. Penone assimilated the natural world into his work, using clay, stone, metal and wood. Anselmo made the forces of gravity, magnetism and entropy visible in stone and lead. Zorio’s alchemical sculptures were altered by electricity, evaporation and oxidation. Pistoletto’s mirror paintings shared the fundamental Arte Povera aim of bridging the gap between art and reality. No longer a hermetic object, the artwork reacted and related to its social and physical situation.
For all their radical invention, Pistoletto’s works were deeply informed by art history. He had grown up surrounded by Renaissance and Baroque art while working in his father’s picture restoration workshop in Turin. The mirror paintings as a whole can be seen to play on the Renaissance trope of painting-as-window, and the present work’s nod to the Sacra conversazione—it also closely recalls Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation (circa 1455)—is one of a number of direct riffs on Old Masterly themes. A related work, Sacra conversazione (Holy Conversation) (1963), is in the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York. Deposizione (Deposition) (1973), with a woman cradling a man, recalls altarpiece scenes of Christ’s descent from the cross; the pose of Maria nuda (Maria Nude) (1967) echoes Titian’s sixteenth-century Venus of Urbino.
The mirror paintings relate to Pistoletto’s long-standing interest in performance art. Following several solo performance works in the mid-1960s, he founded the group Lo Zoo (The Zoo) with his partner, Maria Pioppi, in 1967, presenting a number of collaborative events in galleries, theatres, bars, discotheques, streets and squares. The present work has a similarly theatrical quality. Its content is determined by its audience and setting. The applied image, a depiction of the past, interacts with the present’s ever-changing reflection. As the object itself moves through time and space, it becomes a potential infinity of paintings. Perpetually created anew, Tre Uomini in Grigio captures an iconic moment in Italian art while also staging an encounter with time itself.
Tre Uomini in Grigio is one of a number of mirror paintings in which Pistoletto portrayed his artist friends. His motifs were enlarged from photographs before being laid down on steel. The photographs, including the group portrait that was the basis for the present work, were taken by his friend and collaborator Paolo Mussat Sartor, who was closely associated with the Arte Povera scene. Pistoletto also used this image for two other mirror paintings, Sacra conversazione. Anselmo, Zorio, Penone (1974) and Sacra conversazione. Penone, Zorio, Anselmo (1975). These works show the men full-length and in colour, and—as the titles imply—mirrored so that they appear in a different order from left to right. Tre Uomini in Grigio represents another development. Pistoletto renders the trio in greyscale and alters their positions so that Penone has his back to his companions. For the earliest mirror paintings, which he began making in 1962, he had hand-copied the figures in painted tissue paper. By 1973 he had codified a four-colour silkscreen process, which allowed him to explore different compositional and chromatic permutations.
Pistoletto, Penone, Anselmo and Zorio all rose to prominence during the 1960s as part of the Arte Povera generation. The term was coined by the critic Germano Celant in 1967 to describe a new avant-garde tendency in Italy. These artists were diverse in their approaches but broadly united by their use of ‘poor’ or non-traditional materials. Critical of commercialism, they engaged with the stuff of everyday life, stripping back art’s trappings to explore essential principles of time, matter and energy. Penone assimilated the natural world into his work, using clay, stone, metal and wood. Anselmo made the forces of gravity, magnetism and entropy visible in stone and lead. Zorio’s alchemical sculptures were altered by electricity, evaporation and oxidation. Pistoletto’s mirror paintings shared the fundamental Arte Povera aim of bridging the gap between art and reality. No longer a hermetic object, the artwork reacted and related to its social and physical situation.
For all their radical invention, Pistoletto’s works were deeply informed by art history. He had grown up surrounded by Renaissance and Baroque art while working in his father’s picture restoration workshop in Turin. The mirror paintings as a whole can be seen to play on the Renaissance trope of painting-as-window, and the present work’s nod to the Sacra conversazione—it also closely recalls Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation (circa 1455)—is one of a number of direct riffs on Old Masterly themes. A related work, Sacra conversazione (Holy Conversation) (1963), is in the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York. Deposizione (Deposition) (1973), with a woman cradling a man, recalls altarpiece scenes of Christ’s descent from the cross; the pose of Maria nuda (Maria Nude) (1967) echoes Titian’s sixteenth-century Venus of Urbino.
The mirror paintings relate to Pistoletto’s long-standing interest in performance art. Following several solo performance works in the mid-1960s, he founded the group Lo Zoo (The Zoo) with his partner, Maria Pioppi, in 1967, presenting a number of collaborative events in galleries, theatres, bars, discotheques, streets and squares. The present work has a similarly theatrical quality. Its content is determined by its audience and setting. The applied image, a depiction of the past, interacts with the present’s ever-changing reflection. As the object itself moves through time and space, it becomes a potential infinity of paintings. Perpetually created anew, Tre Uomini in Grigio captures an iconic moment in Italian art while also staging an encounter with time itself.