© Michaelangelo Pistoletto
Purchased from the Fondazione Pistoletto with assistance from Tate
International Council 2006
T12200
Michelangelo Pistoletto was a central figure in the Italian Arte Povera movement. In Venus of the Rags the artist reflects not only upon Italy’s classical past, but on questions of form, material, and the place of art in a changing society. This is the largest and most impressive of the series of works he made on this theme. The statue in the first work was found by the artist in a roadside store selling garden statuary. Here the marble statue is turned towards a mound of old clothes, suggesting both a moving away from the past, and a collision between the historical and the contemporary. The dialogue between oppositions continues through the play between hard/soft, formed/unformed, precious/worthless, fixed/moveable, monochrome/coloured, unique/common, and culture and the everyday.
Francis
Picabia
Michelangelo
Pistoletto
Louise
Bourgeois
Lawrence
Weiner
Rodney
Graham
Fiona
Tan
Carlos
Garaicoa
Olafur
Eliasson
Francis
Alÿs
