Michelangelo Pistoletto is one of the defining figures of postwar European art and a central protagonist of Arte Povera. He trained in his father's painting-restoration studio before turning to self-portraiture in the late 1950s, and held his first solo exhibition in Turin in 1960.
In 1961–62 he arrived at the Mirror Paintings for which he is best known. These are life-size figures, painted and later photo-silkscreened onto mirror-polished stainless steel, that draw the viewer and the surrounding room into the work itself: the image stays fixed while the reflection keeps changing. His Minus Objects (1965–66) and Venus of the Rags (1967) helped shape the vocabulary of Arte Povera. From the 1990s he carried his practice into the social sphere, founding Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella in 1998. In 2003 he introduced the Third Paradise, a reconfigured infinity sign in which two opposing forces meet to generate a third, and it has since been realised by communities across the world. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Wolf Prize in 2007, and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025.
In 2026 Atelier JI produced Preventive Peace Flags for CIRCA. The series accompanied Three Mirrors, Pistoletto's year-long Preventive Peace project with CIRCA, Cittadellarte and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). It comprises twelve hand-signed mirrored works on polished stainless steel. Each is titled as a colour equation, with two colours combining into a third, as in Vivid Red + Primary Yellow = Tangerine, carrying the formula of the Third Paradise into the material of the Mirror Paintings. A share of the proceeds supports Cittadellarte's and CIRCA's public programmes and the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund.
