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Lot Essay
‘The purpose and the result of my mirror paintings was to carry art to the edges of life’ (Michelangelo Pistoletto)
A work of extraordinary intimacy and rarity, Lei e Lui – Maria e Michelangelo (Him and Her – Maria and Michelangelo) is a historic masterpiece from Michelangelo Pistoletto’s celebrated series of ‘mirror paintings’. In this life-sized double portrait, the artist depicts himself with Maria Pioppi—his muse, collaborator and love of his life—their heads bowed together in romantic union. Executed in 1968, soon after the two met, the work became a centrepiece of one of Pistoletto’s most important shows: his first solo exhibition in Rome at Galleria L’Attico that year. Situated at the heart of this interactive, collaborative spectacle, the work announced Pistoletto and Pioppi to the world as partners in life and art. Their image presided over the heart of exhibition, inviting viewers into the couple’s luminous, mirrored realm. The work subsequently remained unseen in public for almost half a century, spending much of this period housed in one of Europe’s most important private Arte Povera collections before being acquired by the present owner.
Pistoletto first met Pioppi in November 1967, and fell in love with her ‘immediately’. She was twenty-nine at the time; he was thirty-four. Pistoletto had travelled to Rome with Pino Pascali: ‘we went to the Pollarolo, a trattoria next to the Piazza del Popolo where the artists often used to go’, he explains. ‘A very small trattoria. I went in and Maria was there with a girlfriend’. She was dressed, he recalls, in a similar manner to the present work: ‘in black, with a turtleneck sweater and a fairly long, I say, three-quarter-length straight skirt that left her ankles barely visible … her face was beautiful … She lived by herself in a garret on the sixth and top floor of an apartment building. We went up the back stairs and on a landing we found a sack of potatoes. Maria took some of them and fried them, and that was all it took to make me fall head over heels in love, obviously’ (M. Pistoletto, quoted in A.Elkann, The Voice of Pistoletto, New York 2013, pp. 44-45). A month later Pioppi came to live with Pistoletto in Turin and the two became inseparable: after fifty years together, they married in 2017.
Pistoletto’s exhibition at Galleria L’Attico was a landmark moment in his career, marking the culmination of his increasingly theatrical, interactive and collaborative approach to art-making. In the reflective surfaces of his ‘mirror paintings’, Pistoletto had already opened his work to the participation of the viewer. In the exhibition, he went further still, aspiring to a total integration of art and life. At the entrance to the gallery, viewers encountered a ‘dressing room’ of sorts, where they were invited to put on costumes borrowed from a Cinecittà film set. As they made their way into the inner room, they caught sight of themselves in another mirror painting, illuminated by a single spotlight like actors upon a stage. The present work hung at the centre of this chamber, casting Pistoletto and Pioppi as the exhibition’s impresarios. Around it were assorted landscaping props from the same film set, twenty empty wooden chairs and two further mirror paintings, including another of Pistoletto and Pioppi seated as if part of the audience.
In March 1967 Pistoletto had been inspired by his meeting with the celebrated ‘Living Theatre’ troupe: a group of actors, led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, who pursued a communal, cooperative and interactive approach to performance. As Pioppi entered his life, Pistoletto, too, would increasingly broaden his art outwards into the world. One of their first collaborative actions in January 1968 was to roll the artist’s Sfera di giornali—a metre-wide ball of soaked and pressed Italian newspapers—through the streets of Turin. Shortly after the exhibition at Galleria L’Attico, he and Pioppi announced the creation of their own theatre troupe Lo Zoo (The Zoo). Active between 1968 and 1970, this circle of artists, writers, actors and musicians became a modern-day commedia dell’arte, bringing anarchic, chaotic theatre to streets, bars and other public spaces. Clad in colourful costumes, Pistoletto and Pioppi played fantastical and absurd roles within these performances. For the couple, it was a kind of artistic honeymoon, cementing the romantic and creative partnership encapsulated in the present work.
Pioppi also became one of Pistoletto’s most important muses, her image lighting up mirror paintings across his oeuvre. Today, these works stand as icons of Arte Povera, their reflective surfaces offering the ultimate slippage between art and reality. Begun in 1961, the series sprung from an epiphany that Pistoletto experienced while making a series of self-portrait studies. Art, he believed, had failed in its bid to mimic life: a more drastic intervention was required. Pistoletto had grown up surrounded by the work of the Old Masters in his father’s picture restoration workshop. The mirror paintings gave dramatic, living form to the Renaissance notion of art as a window onto the world. For the first ten years these works were created by blowing up a photograph, cutting out silhouettes of the figures and using oils and pastels to trace them onto a semi-transparent onion-skin paper, which was then glued to the mirrored surface. Here, this approach lends the couple an illusory, indeterminate quality: together they hover between realms, allowing the viewer—momentarily—to physically step into theirs.
A work of extraordinary intimacy and rarity, Lei e Lui – Maria e Michelangelo (Him and Her – Maria and Michelangelo) is a historic masterpiece from Michelangelo Pistoletto’s celebrated series of ‘mirror paintings’. In this life-sized double portrait, the artist depicts himself with Maria Pioppi—his muse, collaborator and love of his life—their heads bowed together in romantic union. Executed in 1968, soon after the two met, the work became a centrepiece of one of Pistoletto’s most important shows: his first solo exhibition in Rome at Galleria L’Attico that year. Situated at the heart of this interactive, collaborative spectacle, the work announced Pistoletto and Pioppi to the world as partners in life and art. Their image presided over the heart of exhibition, inviting viewers into the couple’s luminous, mirrored realm. The work subsequently remained unseen in public for almost half a century, spending much of this period housed in one of Europe’s most important private Arte Povera collections before being acquired by the present owner.
Pistoletto first met Pioppi in November 1967, and fell in love with her ‘immediately’. She was twenty-nine at the time; he was thirty-four. Pistoletto had travelled to Rome with Pino Pascali: ‘we went to the Pollarolo, a trattoria next to the Piazza del Popolo where the artists often used to go’, he explains. ‘A very small trattoria. I went in and Maria was there with a girlfriend’. She was dressed, he recalls, in a similar manner to the present work: ‘in black, with a turtleneck sweater and a fairly long, I say, three-quarter-length straight skirt that left her ankles barely visible … her face was beautiful … She lived by herself in a garret on the sixth and top floor of an apartment building. We went up the back stairs and on a landing we found a sack of potatoes. Maria took some of them and fried them, and that was all it took to make me fall head over heels in love, obviously’ (M. Pistoletto, quoted in A.Elkann, The Voice of Pistoletto, New York 2013, pp. 44-45). A month later Pioppi came to live with Pistoletto in Turin and the two became inseparable: after fifty years together, they married in 2017.
Pistoletto’s exhibition at Galleria L’Attico was a landmark moment in his career, marking the culmination of his increasingly theatrical, interactive and collaborative approach to art-making. In the reflective surfaces of his ‘mirror paintings’, Pistoletto had already opened his work to the participation of the viewer. In the exhibition, he went further still, aspiring to a total integration of art and life. At the entrance to the gallery, viewers encountered a ‘dressing room’ of sorts, where they were invited to put on costumes borrowed from a Cinecittà film set. As they made their way into the inner room, they caught sight of themselves in another mirror painting, illuminated by a single spotlight like actors upon a stage. The present work hung at the centre of this chamber, casting Pistoletto and Pioppi as the exhibition’s impresarios. Around it were assorted landscaping props from the same film set, twenty empty wooden chairs and two further mirror paintings, including another of Pistoletto and Pioppi seated as if part of the audience.
In March 1967 Pistoletto had been inspired by his meeting with the celebrated ‘Living Theatre’ troupe: a group of actors, led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, who pursued a communal, cooperative and interactive approach to performance. As Pioppi entered his life, Pistoletto, too, would increasingly broaden his art outwards into the world. One of their first collaborative actions in January 1968 was to roll the artist’s Sfera di giornali—a metre-wide ball of soaked and pressed Italian newspapers—through the streets of Turin. Shortly after the exhibition at Galleria L’Attico, he and Pioppi announced the creation of their own theatre troupe Lo Zoo (The Zoo). Active between 1968 and 1970, this circle of artists, writers, actors and musicians became a modern-day commedia dell’arte, bringing anarchic, chaotic theatre to streets, bars and other public spaces. Clad in colourful costumes, Pistoletto and Pioppi played fantastical and absurd roles within these performances. For the couple, it was a kind of artistic honeymoon, cementing the romantic and creative partnership encapsulated in the present work.
Pioppi also became one of Pistoletto’s most important muses, her image lighting up mirror paintings across his oeuvre. Today, these works stand as icons of Arte Povera, their reflective surfaces offering the ultimate slippage between art and reality. Begun in 1961, the series sprung from an epiphany that Pistoletto experienced while making a series of self-portrait studies. Art, he believed, had failed in its bid to mimic life: a more drastic intervention was required. Pistoletto had grown up surrounded by the work of the Old Masters in his father’s picture restoration workshop. The mirror paintings gave dramatic, living form to the Renaissance notion of art as a window onto the world. For the first ten years these works were created by blowing up a photograph, cutting out silhouettes of the figures and using oils and pastels to trace them onto a semi-transparent onion-skin paper, which was then glued to the mirrored surface. Here, this approach lends the couple an illusory, indeterminate quality: together they hover between realms, allowing the viewer—momentarily—to physically step into theirs.