Overview

Examining the Italian artist's career-long exploration of the human figure, this book offers new perspectives on the history of postwar and contemporary art Widely regarded as the central protagonist of Arte Povera, the twentieth-century Italian art movement characterized by its rejection of representation, Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933) is known for his movement-defining Minus Objects and iconic mirror paintings, as well as his recent social practice addressing migration and climate change. What has unified Pistoletto's work over six decades, argues author Tenley Bick, is his persistent, and seemingly paradoxical, investigation of figuration, most often as a system of representation of the human body. Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics traces the figure as a throughline across the artist's painting, photomontage, sculpture, installation, performance, and social practice, from the formative years of his career in the 1950s to today. It situates Pistoletto's exploration of the figure within the culture and leftist politics of Italy and beyond in the 1960s and 1970s to examine why, in an era that was defined, for many, by the end of humanism, Pistoletto held on to the figure as an embattled platform for rethinking art and the world. Featuring previously unseen early drawings and design work, newly discovered exhibition histories, and insights gleaned from interviews with the artist, this book reframes our understanding of a prolific artist and of artmaking in the postwar era.

Full Product Details

9780300278347

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""Thoroughly researched, Tenley Bick's deep engagement with Michelangelo Pistoletto represents a significant contribution to art history and offers a wide perspective on Italian cultural and socio-political history.""--Elizabeth Mangini, author of Seeing Through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture ""Michelangelo Pistoletto offers a comprehensive account of a towering figure of Arte Povera and twentieth-century Italian art, as well as his wide influence, while also providing careful new readings of the art itself.""--Jaleh Mansoor, author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia"

Author Information

Tenley Bick is associate professor of art history at Florida State University.

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