The artist's studio.

Michelangelo Pistoletto first began making his Mirror Paintings in the early 1960s, and they were exhibited for the first time in 1963, in a solo show at the Galleria Galatea in Turin. These works were met with immediate public and critical acclaim, and catapulted the artist to international recognition, exhibiting at major European and American galleries in the second half of the decade. Pistoletto has continued to create these paintings over the course of his long and storied career; the present work is an example of one of the more recent Mirror Paintings from the series.

The Mirror Paintings constitute the foundation of Pistoletto’s work, the basis of both his subsequent research and artistic production and his theoretical reflection. He has constantly returned to them in order to probe their significance more deeply and develop their implications. The essential characteristics of the Mirror Paintings, identified by the artist himself, are: the dimension of time, not just represented, but active and ongoing; the inclusion in the work of the observer and the surroundings, which make it a “self-portrait of the world”; the meeting of opposing pairs (stasis/dynamism, surface/depth, absolute/relative, etc.), brought into play by the interaction between the image of photographic origin and what is going on in the virtual space generated by the reflective surface; and the fact of no longer being an illusory window open onto the world, as in the conception of the picture that emerged with Renaissance perspective and reached its conclusion with the historic avant-gardes of the 20th century. Unlike this perspective, directed exclusively forward, the mirror painting now offered a twofold perspective, showing both what is in front and what is behind us and thus creating an opening through which the setting in which it is displayed extends into the virtual space of the work, a door connecting art and life.

In terms of technique, the early Mirror Paintings were created by a process of tracing an enlarged photograph onto a mirror-finished sheet of stainless steel, transferred through thin paper; however by 1973, the artist had adopted a silkscreen process, through which a photographic image could be applied directly to the reflective surface. This pioneering silkscreen technique is what is used in the present piece, Girl Drawing Space.