The artistic interventions of the Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto will be exhibited from the Museum of Fine Arts in Recoleta to the Quinquela Martín Museum in La Boca as part of BIENALSUR 2019.
Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933), one of the main representatives of Arte Povera (impoverished art), visited Buenos Aires in late October to tour the spaces included in the Pistoletto Circuit, one of the highlights of the BIENALSUR 2019 programme.
In June 2019, along with the opening of the Biennial, Pistoletto will conduct a series of artistic interventions engaging in a dialogue with the city in an itinerary that comprises the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) located at Avenida del Libertador 1473, the Immigrants’ Hotel venue of Muntref on Antártida Argentina Avenue, and the district of La Boca, where activities especially designed for the local public will be organized in collaboration with the Benito Quinquela Martín Museum.
Pistoletto’s works explore genres such as happening, performance or mise-en-scene, which the artist conceives through the use of all kinds of materials, many of them from everyday life, such as clothing, old newspapers, wood and cardboard, as well as his recurrent and philosophical use of mirrors.
In the same period and until October, Pistoletto will conduct an intervention of the permanent hall of the Immigrants´ Hotel venue of Muntref in a dialogue with the curatorial approach characteristic of the collection therein displayed. Hall 1 of the Contemporary Art Centre will be entirely devoted to his work, which will go beyond the building to interfere the garden adjacent to the museum.
Within the framework of BIENALSUR, the Italian artist’s work will apply concepts embedded in pieces such The Third Paradise, City of Art and Demopraxia, which allude to the significant role of art in a “responsible social transformation as a binding, communication and activation element in society”, as he pointed out during the free conference he gave at the Untref Rectorate Office on the occasion of his visit to Argentina.
“In Arte Povera, the word ‘povera’ (poor) does not mean penniless but ‘essential’, in a direct relationship with the earth, with the phenomenology of existence”, he said in the course of a dialogue with Diana Wechsler, the Artistic Director of the Biennial and the Brazilian curator Marcello Dantas before a full house.
