Sculpture
is a passion Pistoletto has nurtured since childhood, when at the
age of fourteen he bought, on installment, an antique wood sculpture,
the first of a collection he augmented over the years. Beginning in
1967, he used casts of classical sculptures for some of his works,
such as Venus of the Rags (1967) or The Etruscan
(1976). The Annunciation (1980)—in which a cast of
a statue is overlaid with a second figure in polyurethane—and
The Giant (1981), which superimposed casts of several statues—foreshadowed
the subsequent production of true sculptures, in the etymological
sense of the term, made of rigid polyurethane, a material chosen for
the speed with which it can be modeled. So, in just a few days, using
polychrome polyurethane blocks, he created a group of works called
Nativity, shown in New York at Salvatore Ala Gallery in November
1981. Later sculptures increasingly took on the appearance of condensed
and elaborated fragments recovered as though they were objects ‘found’
in the memory of the sculptural tradition—an appearance particularly
clear in such works as The Acrobat (1982) or Tree
(1983). From 1984 on, he also used marble to ‘copy’ the
polyurethane sculptures on a large scale, or superimposed marble and
polyurethane as in the group, The Four Seasons (1985). |
