From
October 1975 to September 1976, in the new spaces of Galleria Christian
Stein in Turin (three rooms connected by three doors aligned on the
same axis and similar in size to the mirror paintings), Pistoletto
had twelve consecutive shows. The shows opened at the pace of one
a month, each announced in advance by a text by the artist, fusing
the moments of ideation, realization and exhibition and lending itself
to a continuous dialogue with visitors over a one-year period. It
is the first of what the artist calls “time continents”,
to be followed by White Year (1989) and Happy Turtle
(1993). The exhibition “Time Continents”, at the Musée
d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2001), was devoted to this specific
aspect of Pistoletto’s work.
The articulation of creative processes and temporal dimensions, it
will be noted, occurs again and again in Pistoletto’s work.
In addition to the works and events mentioned above, attention can
be drawn, for example, to A Book, the Literary Side of the Painting,
1970 (a work made of 31 canvases, turned upside down, on which wooden
crosspieces Pistoletto, in one single day, wrote one short text);
the exhibition “All the Women” (during the month-long
show Pistoletto and Maria Pioppi painted the white canvases initially
exhibited in the gallery) and The Time of the Mirror, 1986,
at Magazin in Grenoble (during the month-long exhibition Pistoletto
covered the 680 square meters of walls in the exhibition space, a
former industrial shed, with black drawings). |
