Michelangelo Pistoletto valuation

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He learned drawing and painting from his father, a painter and restorer, and worked in the family restoration studio in Turin from the age of fourteen; he later studied at Armando Testa's advertising school. In 1961 and 1962 he made the first Mirror Paintings: a photograph enlarged to life size, traced and painted on tissue paper and applied to mirror-polished stainless steel, so that the viewer and the room become part of the picture. From the 1970s he silkscreened the images onto the steel. His Minus Objects of 1965 and 1966 are considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, a movement in which he played a leading part, and in 1967 he made Venus of the Rags, a figure of Venus set against a pile of rags. In 1998 he opened Cittadellarte, the Fondazione Pistoletto, in a former textile mill in Biella. He received the Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the Wolf Foundation Prize in 2007 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013, the year the Louvre gave him a solo exhibition.

Besides the Mirror Paintings he made paintings on canvas, sculpture and prints. Polished steel shows every scratch, dent and fingerprint, so check the surface closely and never clean it with abrasives. Some Mirror Paintings carry two dates, one for the image and one for the steel, and both should be recorded. Keep any certificate signed by the artist and the gallery invoice with the work; for prints, note the edition number and signature.