Michelangelo Pistoletto at Blenheim Palace
The Blenheim Art Foundation is delighted to present Michelangelo Pistoletto at Blenheim Palace, a solo exhibition running from 15th September – 31st December 2016 celebrating the extensive oeuvre of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto.
A founding father of Italian Arte Povera, Pistoletto is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. The exhibition will explore the diverse range of his fifty-year practice, from painting and sculpture to large-scale installation, as well as showcasing new works made specifically for Blenheim Palace and integrated into the fabric of the Palace’s eighteenth-century interiors and surrounding grounds. Having been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Louvre, Paris, and Serpentine Gallery, London, Pistoletto’s project at Blenheim Palace will be the artist’s most comprehensive UK show to date. Among the canonical works featured will be the artist’s ongoing series of Mirror Paintings, photo-silkscreened images on polished steel which project the viewer’s reflection into the picture plane.
We will host new works as well as continue Pistoletto’s ongoing Third Paradise project, conceived in 2003, in which the artist envisions a third ‘realm’ which reconciles the natural world with the artificial world, proposing a society which can live in harmony with nature. We will provide a perfect seat for these meetings of past and present, rich and poor, grandeur and simplicity, artifice and nature.
Michael Frahm, Director of the Blenheim Art Foundation, said:
"We are delighted to present the first UK retrospective of one of the most revered visual artists working today, tracing back to the early self-portraits which launched his career, and leading all the way up to the new work which will be created for this show. Pistoletto’s extensive and powerful career has been a major influence on contemporary art and modern thought. He is a counter-cultural figure who questions society and explores philosophy through a body of work which is witty, poetic and always unexpected."
