In 2015, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Michelangelo Pistoletto's work The Rebirth, consisting of 193 stones (representing current Member States of the United Nations), installed based on the symbol of The Third Paradise, was completed at the Ariana Park of the Palais des Nations at United Nations Headquarters in Geneva. The Rebirth marked a new beginning and has been permanently installed in the Ariana Park at the Palais des Nations.

Born in 1933, Michelangelo Pistoletto is a pioneer of Italian contemporary art. He launched his artistic career with figurative painting and self-portraiture in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, he turned to painting on mirrors and became one of the Arte Povera Movement founders. At the same time, the Mirror Painting series has become one of his most celebrated and representative works. In the 90s, he proactively engaged art to all spheres of society, aiming to provoke and create "responsible social change." After the millennium, he introduced The Third Paradise, which further emphasizes the balance between the artificial world and nature.

Michelangelo Pistoletto's Mirror Painting began in 1962 and adopted the "reflective" properties, including the viewer's appearance and the scene before it. In a medium of "reflected reality," an infinite philosophical and aesthetic endeavor unfold. Throughout the decades, the artist has progressively elevated the relationship between the mirror and the viewer, either through painting on or breaking the mirror, into a relationship between an individual and the world.

"Over time, the change of light, the people coming and going, you would find all the possibilities of the world appearing inside the mirror and then disappearing, and so on so forth. We see our existence for a very limited amount of time. The mirror doesn't represent my will or act as my emotion; it simply reflects phenomena."

In his 2018 solo exhibition "Beyond the Mirror", at the Galleria Continua, Michelangelo Pistoletto wielded a mallet in front of a large audience. He broke a mirror at once in a "destructive” performance. The audience became the fourth dimension of the mirror, "in the present," and the mallet, a symbol of "generative destruction," shatters it in order to create a new connection with "us" beyond the mirror.

"I smashed all the mirrors with a big wooden mallet. The idea is to break the 'I' from 'one' to 'zero.' And these shattered mirrors, although having lost their existence, can nevertheless continue to reflect everything around them. This means it is 'both nothing and everything.' When we let go of 'ourselves', we would eliminate our differences and embrace 'everything.' In other cases, I narrow the angle of two mirrors, so the images reflected from the two 'I's would increase until they are perfectly aligned, which generates an infinite cycle."

In 2013, at the Louvre's Maillard Atrium, the artist's large-scale installation, The Obelisk and the Third Paradise cautioned each of us of our obligations from a global perspective, in creating the great myth of The Third Paradise. The work wittily appropriates the Louvre's glittering historical space, which holds the treasures of the human spirit. Hung above the Obelisk like a rainbow, the ∞ symbol of infinity, suggests that the earth should be "a protected garden," and we the "gardeners."

Michelangelo Pistoletto is committed to exploring humanity's transcendence and the great prophecies of a new vision of civilization. His command of space and mirror reflections speaks volumes of his philosophical and political position, as in his 2008 work Ready to Go, Walking Sculptures, which transformed all his life into a spiritual sparkle left to humanity.

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began to exhibit his work in 1955 and had his first solo show in 1960 with Galleria Galatea in Turin. His early work is characterized by an inquiry into self-portraiture. In the two year period from 1961-1962, the first Mirror Paintings were made, which incorporate the viewer and real time into the work directly, opening up perspective, and reversing Renaissance perspective that had been closed off by the twentieth century avant-garde. These works quickly brought Pistoletto international acclaim, leading to individual shows in important galleries and museums in Europe and the United States in the sixties. The Mirror Paintings provided the foundation of his subsequent artistic output and theoretical exploration. In 1965 and 1966, he produced a set of works entitled Minus Objects, considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement for which Pistoletto was an animating force and key protagonist. In 1967, he began working outside traditional exhibition spaces, with the first instances of the“creative collaboration” he developed over the following decades by bringing together artists from different disciplines and diverse sectors of society. From 1975-1976, he presented a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, “LeStanze”, at the Stein Gallery in Turin. This was the first of a series of complex, year-long works known as “time continents”, others include White Year (1989) and Happy Turtle (1992). In 1978, in a show in Turin, Pistoletto defined two main directions for his future artistic production:“Division and Multiplication of the Mirror” and “Art Takes On Religion”. In the early eighties, he made a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane translated into marble for his solo show in 1984 at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989, he created the series of “dark” volumes called Art of Squalor. During the nineties, with Project Art and his creations in Biella of Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he brought art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003, he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004, the University of Turin awarded him an honorary degree in Political Science. On that occasion, the artist announced the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise. In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world.” In 2010, he wrote the essay “The Third Paradise”, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2011, he was the artistic director of “Evento 2011 – L'art pour uneré-évolution urbaine” in Bordeaux. In 2012, he started promoting the Rebirth-day, the first worldwide day of rebirth, celebrated every year on December 21st with initiatives taking place all over the world. In 2013, the Louvre in Paris hosted his personal exhibition “Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre”. The same year, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, in Tokyo. In 2014, the symbol of the Third Paradise was installed in the hall of the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in Bruxelles for the duration of the Italian Presidency of the European Council. In May 2015, he received an honorary degree from the Universidad de las Artes of Havana in Cuba. In the same year, he realized a work of epic scale entitled Rebirth, situated in the park of the Palaisdes Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the UN. In 2016, he exhibited his works in Havana, Cuba, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, with a great retrospective exhibition which encompassed his entire artistic journey, from the paintings of the 1960s to the latest works on the Third Paradise and the Cuban Mirror Paintings, executed the previous year. In 2017, the artist participated in an auxiliary event of the 57th Venice Biennial with the exhibition “One and One Makes Three” at the San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey complex in Venice.