The Venus of the Rags is the best-known of the works Pistoletto created using rags, and is considered the emblem of Arte Povera, the Italian art movement of which Pistoletto was a leading figure.
The Venus of the Rags was created using a concrete copy of the Venus with Pommel by the neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, inspired by the legendary Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles, the first female nude in Greek art, subsequently lost and now known only through the countless copies made since Greek and Roman times giving shape to this ideal of classical beauty. Pistoletto bought one such copy from a garden statue retailer, took it to his study and used it to hang his paint rags, the ones he usually used to clean the surfaces of his Mirror Paintings. The juxtaposition of rags and the statue of Venus produces a vibrant polarity similar to the one characterising the Mirror Paintings: a fixed figure seen from the back, the statue depicting an ideal of eternal beauty passed down through the centuries, and a multiplicity of potentially endless and always changing rags, a symbol of waste and degradation, but also of consumerism, recycling, and of social marginalization.
Artista: Michelangelo Pistoletto (ITA)
