Michelangelo Pistoletto to Show at Blenheim Palace

Michelangelo Pistoletto is having an exhibition in the opulent setting of Blenheim Palace in September. The 82-year-old Italian is the third contemporary artist to be given a show at the palace, seat of the dukes of Marlborough and one of Europe’s great secular buildings.

The exhibition, titled “Michelangelo Pistoletto at Blenheim Palace” (15 September-31 December), will feature more than 40 works created over the past 50 years and is billed as the artist’s most comprehensive in the UK to date. His last show in the country was at the Serpentine Gallery in 2011. The Blenheim exhibition will play on the contrast between high art and base materials with works such as Venus of the Rags (1967), which combines a classical-style sculpture of the Roman goddess of love with a pile of discarded clothes.

A number of Pistoletto’s mirror paintings, first conceived in the 1960s, will be installed among the other portraits that populate the palace. “Everything in my work has come from the mirror, and the idea that it reflects society and reality,” the artist told the Guardian in 2014.