Michelangelo Pistoletto: Molti di uno (Many from One)

Castello di Rivoli presents a major exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933) on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Set up in the vast spaces of the Manica Lunga wing of the castle, Pistoletto’s Molti di uno (Many from One) reinvents the linear picture gallery architecture of the Manica Lunga, transforming it into an irregular and free-form urban device through which to collect and reread all his art in a gigantic self-portrait which works like the map of an ideal city of the future.

“Pistoletto is one of the most multifaceted, innovative, creative and visionary figures of contemporary art on a global level,” says Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. “Already active in the second half of the twentieth century, he is capable of reimagining the world in the twenty-first century through his ‘formula of creation’, in the name of a new ‘trinamic’ balance between the natural and artificial that he calls the Third Paradise.”

Pistoletto is among the artists who have redefined the concept of art since the mid-sixties of the last century through Arte Povera. Already from the first half of the 1950s, the artist questioned the concept of personal identity and embarked on the path of the self-portrait as an emblematic expression of his thought according to which the individual subject comes to life in relation to others, becoming a plural subject. Since 1962 he has been creating mirror paintings, in which the viewer and the world enter the work. Overcoming the boundaries marked by the purely pictorial dimension represented for Pistoletto the opening to a landscape that overlooks the contemporaneity of existence.

“Designed for the Manica Lunga,” says Marcella Beccaria, “Molti di uno is a city of art structured as walkable architecture and made up of 29 Uffizi (Offices) or rooms. Designed as open and connected spaces, the Uffizi include metaverse, art, science, philosophy, law, law, architecture, communication, politics, ecology, surveillance, sports, mathematics, spirituality, religion, mythology, education, nourishment, symbolism, cosmology, design, burial, history, urban planning, fashion, space, writing, health, information technology, nature. The 29 Uffizi expose the structure which, according to the artist, is the basis of civil and social life, proposing a vast network of interrelations and a proactive dynamic condition aimed at breaking down walls and separations.”