at the back: signature

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Rome.

EXPOSURE
The time of the mirror, Grenoble, Center National d'Art Contemporain, 8 November 1986 - 11 January 1987

Work from the installation "Time in the Mirror" created by Michelangelo Pistoletto in November 1986 at the Center National d'Art Contemporain Grenoble, consisting of a mirror and approximately 680 square meters of charcoal on paper.

We are in the midst of the Art of Squalor: a cycle begun by Pistoletto in 1985 during the exhibition at the Persano Gallery in Turin, and ended in 1989 with the exhibition held in Rome at the Pieroni Gallery.

“Art of squalor, parasitic art, of mortification. Surface of desolation, obtuse surface. A repulsive art that represents nothing. [...] Mass of chopped ideas, shredded objects, mangled, macerated, soaked and compressed meanings. Shatters of instruments and concepts: star dust, cosmic foam, meteorite lava, sidereal ice. Fountains of greyish flows. Idiotic thicknesses of a crushed and drooled art, as tiring as childbirth. Art without weight and without tools. But gross like the swarming of disgusting humanity. A cowardly and serious art that reaches the maximum distance and the maximum slowness without letting itself be touched by either infinity or immobility. The motion is slow like the catastrophic motion of the universe. The speed of close movement, the violence of transformation, the speed of change in close distances is replaced by the slowness of large distances. And the perception of contemporaneity, beyond time-space [...]”
(M. Pistoletto, Poetica dura, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Giorgio Persano, Turin, 1985)