Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics

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.

Tenley Bick is associate professor of global postwar and contemporary art at Florida State University.