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Lot Essay
'Piero put realistic figures in an abstract space. The space had its own presence, not as specific place, but as an indefinable void. Fontana took abstract painting and made the space real, by slicing through the illusion of the painted, coloured surface. These were important steps in my mind. The mirror also changed how I perceived space. Everything that came after the Mirror Paintings had to do with different ways of exploring space. For me the mirror was not only an illusionistic pathway back through the wall, back into the space of the traditional perspective or even into the material cut of Fontana and the mysterious dark space behind the canvas. It suggested a double projection, in to the wall and out into the space of the viewer. In a way it integrated painting and sculpture. You could virtually walk in the space that was reflected in the painting...For centuries we have been projecting ourselves into the fictional space of painting. I thought it was time to have the space project out to us, to once again create space. '('Interview with Michael Auping', K. Burton, (ed.) Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mirror Paintings London, 2010, p. 67)
Catena (Chain) is a comparatively early example of the celebrated mirror paintings that Michelangelo Pistoletto first made in the mid-1960s and which he has continued to produce throughout his career ever since. A particularly minimalistic example comprising solely of the painted tissue-paper image of an iron chain stretched across a highly reflective polished stainless steel ground, Catena is a work that elegantly encapsulates the fundamental essence of Pistoletto's mirror paintings and the mysterious borderline between different realities that they articulate.
Growing out of a series of self-portraits inspired by the work of Francis Bacon in the early 1960s, the introduction of the mirror as the fundamental pictorial ground of his work represented what Pistoletto has called 'the next step in expanding the space of the pictorial.' (Ibid. p. 65) The mirror allowed reality, or at least the temporal reflection of the reality of the world outside the picture at any given time, to enter into the domain of the picture frame. Over these empty reflective surfaces, into which the viewer's image and the boundaries of the room into which the mirror painting was placed would enter, Pistoletto's practice is to lay a fixed reproductive image of a figure or an object. This element is 'very important', Pistoletto has said, because it 'complicates the space of the mirror. It's not what you call a 'one liner'. It adds another perceptual element. I was never interested in using the mirror as a Readymade.' (Ibid, p. 65)
Catena is one of a number of particularly iconic and Minimalist-looking mirror paintings in which the reproductive image of a solitary object isolated against the vast expanse of reflective space of the mirror has been used to emphasize the extraordinary boundary between different realities that Pistoletto's mirror paintings reveal. Stretched across the empty, reflecting plane of steel, the chain, as in the bricks, the cage or the gate of other Pistoletto mirror paintings from this period or indeed the wire fence and warning sign of his Pericolo di morte (Danger of Death) of 1974, appears to formally section off and confine the space of the mirror with a simple but stark authoritarianism. Such formal demarcation motifs became increasingly common in Pistoletto's work in the years immediately following the political upheavals of 1968 and are perhaps reflective therefore of the increasingly stark political climate that followed the events of that year.
Catena (Chain) is a comparatively early example of the celebrated mirror paintings that Michelangelo Pistoletto first made in the mid-1960s and which he has continued to produce throughout his career ever since. A particularly minimalistic example comprising solely of the painted tissue-paper image of an iron chain stretched across a highly reflective polished stainless steel ground, Catena is a work that elegantly encapsulates the fundamental essence of Pistoletto's mirror paintings and the mysterious borderline between different realities that they articulate.
Growing out of a series of self-portraits inspired by the work of Francis Bacon in the early 1960s, the introduction of the mirror as the fundamental pictorial ground of his work represented what Pistoletto has called 'the next step in expanding the space of the pictorial.' (Ibid. p. 65) The mirror allowed reality, or at least the temporal reflection of the reality of the world outside the picture at any given time, to enter into the domain of the picture frame. Over these empty reflective surfaces, into which the viewer's image and the boundaries of the room into which the mirror painting was placed would enter, Pistoletto's practice is to lay a fixed reproductive image of a figure or an object. This element is 'very important', Pistoletto has said, because it 'complicates the space of the mirror. It's not what you call a 'one liner'. It adds another perceptual element. I was never interested in using the mirror as a Readymade.' (Ibid, p. 65)
Catena is one of a number of particularly iconic and Minimalist-looking mirror paintings in which the reproductive image of a solitary object isolated against the vast expanse of reflective space of the mirror has been used to emphasize the extraordinary boundary between different realities that Pistoletto's mirror paintings reveal. Stretched across the empty, reflecting plane of steel, the chain, as in the bricks, the cage or the gate of other Pistoletto mirror paintings from this period or indeed the wire fence and warning sign of his Pericolo di morte (Danger of Death) of 1974, appears to formally section off and confine the space of the mirror with a simple but stark authoritarianism. Such formal demarcation motifs became increasingly common in Pistoletto's work in the years immediately following the political upheavals of 1968 and are perhaps reflective therefore of the increasingly stark political climate that followed the events of that year.