'Once you put your hand in front of one of these mirrors, your body merges with the space. You become a part of that space. This was the concept behind the Mirror Paintings from the beginning—to have the human presence feel connected to an always expanding and changing space.'
—Michelangelo Pistoletto

Executed in 1967, Ragazza in minigonna / Ragazza seduta per terra is an exquisite early example of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Quadri specchianti, or Mirror Paintings, that form the cornerstone of the artist’s celebrated oeuvre. Created in the pivotal year that curator and critic Germano Celant coined the term ‘Arte Povera’, the radical avant-garde movement pioneered by Pistoletto, the present work depicts the artist’s close friend Graziella Derossi sitting on the floor while the viewer, when approaching the painting, enters the figure’s space, engendering a dynamic oscillation between illusion and reality, reflection and perception. Testifying to its historic significance, Ragazza in minigonna / Ragazza seduta per terra featured in the artist’s first action piece, La fine di Pistoletto (The End of Pistoletto), at the Piper Pluriclub, Turin on March 6, 1967, as well as Pistoletto’s landmark exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels the following month and documenta 4, Kassel in 1968. In 2010, the present work was included in the artist’s first major American survey, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

 

 

'When I realized that someone like Pollock, although he attempted to transfer life onto canvas through action, did not succeed in taking possession of the work, which continued to escape him, remaining autonomous, and that the presence of the human figure in the painting of Bacon did not succeed in rendering a pathological vision of reality, I understood that the moment had arrived to make the laws of objective reality enter the painting.'
—Michelangelo Pistoletto

An ongoing series begun in 1962 and the artist’s most acclaimed body of work, the Mirror Paintings emerged out of a series of self-portraits Pistoletto created between the late 1950s and early 1960s after seeing the first exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work in Italy at the Galleria Galatea, Turin in 1958. In 1961, after seeing his own reflection in the black ground of his self-portrait, ‘the objectivity of it brought me into a new way of looking at portraiture, as well as pictorial space,’ the artist recalled. ‘You find yourself in an unusual space between the picture, the mirror, and the world around the picture and the mirror. These are all realities which surround you. For me, objectivity means finding a way to integrate these realities.’ⁱ Thus, the subject of Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings as Ragazza in minigonna / Ragazza seduta per terra would not become the depicted figure nor the viewer, but the question of realities and the ever-changing present as seen through ‘portraits of interactions […] as a changing portrait of society.’ⁱⁱ As Pistoletto explained, ‘The true protagonist was the relationship of instantaneousness that was created between the spectator, his own reflection, and the painted figure, in an ever-present movement that concentrated the past and the figure in itself to such an extent as to cause one to call their very existence into doubt: it was the dimension of time itself.’ⁱⁱⁱ
 

For his first Mirror Paintings comprising Ragazza in minigonna / Ragazza seduta per terra, Pistoletto used his close circle of friends as his photographed models, frequently choosing to photograph his subjects in profile or from the back to keep his figures unidentifiable. Seeking to create ‘a more visually harmonious relationship between depicted subject and the reflections in the polished steel’, the artist enlarged the photograph to life size and traced the image of the figure into a monochromatic rendering with black paint and pencil onto tissue paper (velina).^iv The velina was then flipped over and adhered to the stainless-steel surface—resulting in a reversed orientation of the figure’s pose from the photograph—after which painted color was applied to the tissue-paper rendering. The present work, as well as other early examples from the series, distinguish themselves from Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings created after 1971, when the artist changed his process by replacing the velina with a silkscreened imaged on the mirrored surface.
 

 

By integrating viewers into the space of the work itself, a fundamental concept that pervades Pistoletto’s practice, Ragazza in minigonna / Ragazza seduta per terra engenders a tension between the static and dynamic, second and third dimensions, representation and reality. While the figure inhabits the world of created art or a fixed past, the viewer breaks into this realm through the portal of his or her reflected image in the mirror, thereby simultaneously challenging the notion of lived realities and spatial dimensions—both in life and in art. ‘For me’, Pistoletto recently expressed, ‘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, into 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.’^v Shattering the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the present work thus further invokes inquiries into perception of the self in relation to the external world. In the words of Jeremy Lewison, ‘A Mirror Painting is a means to orientation in the world, of encouraging conscious experience of phenomena as experiences from the first person point of view, invoking perception, thought, memory, bodily awareness and social activity. It is a work of art in the world and the world in a work of art.’^vi

 

ⁱ Michelangelo Pistoletto, quoted in Michael Auping, ‘Society and Surface: Two Interviews with Michelangelo Pistoletto,’ in Katharine Burton, ed., Michelangelo Pistoletto: Mirror Paintings, Ostfildern, 2011, p. 64.
ⁱⁱ Michelangelo Pistoletto, quoted in Michael Auping, ‘Society and Surface: Two Interviews with Michelangelo Pistoletto,’ in Katharine Burton, ed., Michelangelo Pistoletto: Mirror Paintings, Ostfildern, 2011, pp. 65-66.
ⁱⁱⁱ Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Minus Objects (exh. cat.), Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, 1966, n.p.
^iv Suzanne Penn, ‘“The Complicity of the Materials” in Pistoletto's Paintings and Mirror Paintings,’ in Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2010, p. 149.
^v Michelangelo Pistoletto, quoted in Michael Auping, ‘Society and Surface: Two Interviews with Michelangelo Pistoletto’, in Katharine Burton, ed., Michelangelo Pistoletto: Mirror Paintings, Ostfildern, 2011, p. 67.
^vi Jeremy Lewison, ‘Looking at Pistoletto/Looking at Myself’, In Katharine Burton, ed., Michelangelo Pistoletto: Mirror Paintings, Ostfildern, 2011, p. 33.