Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many

In the fall of 2010, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a major exhibition devoted to the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933) in the Dorrance Galleries for Special Exhibitions. Widely recognized as a key figure in the development of Italian art in the 1950s and 1960s and a founding member of the Arte Povera movement, Pistoletto has also gained increasing recognition in this country as an important influence on a younger generation of artists involved with the participatory practices that have become increasingly prevalent in contemporary art during the past two decades.
The first major survey of works by Pistoletto in the United States in more than twenty years, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956 - 1974 will place his art in the context of the cultural transformation of Western Europe that occurred after World War II and relate his work to developments in Italian and American art since the 1960s, including Pop Art, Minimalism, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. Drawn from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, it will include some 100 works, many of which have never been exhibited in this country.