Pistoletto at Levy Gorvy Dayan

Credit line Installation view of Michelangelo Pistoletto: To Step Beyond, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York, 2025 © Elisabeth Bernstein

By MICHAEL KLEIN February 10, 2025

Rare that such a great artist from Italy arrives in the US. The Levy Gorvy Dayan gallery has collaborated with Galleria Continua to bring Pistoletto’s latest work to New York. His last major show which I saw in Philadelphia was simply stunning - a wonderful assemblage of works, Michelangelo Pistoletto Form One to Many 1956-1974 in 2010. Here in New York, a mini survey if you will, with work from the 60s and 70s to the present - a tour de force exhibition. 

The new works from 2024 on view are bold and colorful and demonstrate ideas that are uniquely Pistoletto, the mirror. Also some very modern images of this strange but now common QR code in color, oil on canvas— a window or door to the digital world. While the tool online takes us to different sites he imagines, on the wall it is a trope about who and what we are attempting to communicate to machines.  The humanism of Arte Povera remains in the works of  mirror, and the sculpture called Agenda 2090 1967/2024 — the use of found materials to create a visually dynamic  poetry produced by this Italian movement of the 60s. The last Arte Povera show curated by the late Germano Celant was at P.S.1 back in the 1985.

Thirty years later, we are invited to a new exhibition by one of the leading members of this radical art movement that changed the character of post-war Italian art. There is nothing more ubiquitous or more familiar, more used everywhere than the mirror - the gallery is filled with mirrors. Framed mirrors collaged with acrylic color, as the press release describes: hued in a spectrum from red, orange, yellow, and green, to blue.  The magic of the reflection of the mirror in the room creates a space beyond the mirror into a reflected space that we can’t reach, though we can see it. The mirror is the metaphor for what we know and what we see and what might be reflected that we do not know firsthand. As Pistoletto himself has said, “If art is life’s mirror, than I’m the mirror maker. Standing in front of a mirror, we can and did become a part of the art installation itself, as if we are in dialogue with the mirror maker himself.

This interchange between art and viewer is key to Pistoetto’s ideas, we are always part of the equation more than a viewer, we are the desired participant. WM