The work of globally recognized Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto recently came to the forefront as the 91-year-old was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize last week.
Gaining worldwide attention in the early 1960s for his “Mirror Paintings,” Pistoletto used his art to promote the “Third Paradise” movement – the concept that art can create peace among societies.
Florida State University Associate Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art Tenley Bick is a world expert on Pistoletto. A professor and historian in the Department of Art History, part of the College of Fine Arts, Bick has written a new book examining Pistoletto’s exploration of the human figure and provides new perspective on the history of postwar and contemporary art. It is the first English-language monograph on the artist and the first monograph in any language on him since the mid-1980s.
“Pistoletto has, for more than six decades, held a prominent position in the scholarship on art history and on the global stage of the art world,” Bick said. “Despite his importance for modern and contemporary art, he is an artist whose prolific and varied work, in a range of media (including painting, sculpture and performance), has long defied easy categorization and has therefore, perhaps, not yet been — until now — the subject of a single-author scholarly study.”
Focusing on Pistoletto’s investigation of conventional figuration as a critical model for postwar creative practice, her book offers a counter-narrative to dominant histories of postwar art in and out of Italy.
She became the first American to accept an invitation as a Scholar in Residence at the Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, a museum and research center located just north of New York City. The fellowship-residency gave Bick access to the necessary art and literature needed to complete her monograph on Pistoletto for publication.
Bick is an expert in several areas of art history, including Italian modernism, modern and contemporary African art and cinemas, art of the 1960s and 1970s and much more. Her writing has been featured in nearly 20 publications.
Media inquiries about Pistoletto and his body of work can contact Bick at tbick@fsu.edu.
Tenley Bick, associate professor of global modern and contemporary art, Florida State University
What inspired your examination of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s work over the years?
“My examination of his work was inspired by the artist’s emergence in postwar Italy, at a time of incredible artistic experimentation and sociopolitical unrest. I was also struck by the engaging quality of this artist’s work, which often, by using reflective materials and images of the human figure, integrates the real environment of the artwork’s display and the viewer’s own reflection into the previously separate, representational world of painting. I was also inspired by the many questions that I think his work poses for major histories of modern and contemporary art. If abstract art, for example, has dominated histories of art after World War II, what do we do with the work of Pistoletto, who has long focused on the image of the human figure and on experiments in figuration —strategies that seem at odds with now codified histories of what counts as “radical” or vanguard artistic practice. Finally, I was inspired by his ceaseless dedication to creative work and belief in art as a means of social transformation, as seen in his work with intergovernmental organizations like the U.N. That belief and work is inspiring, and rightly validated, I think, by his recent nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
How does your new book explore the impact of Pistoletto’s art?
“My book examines Pistoletto in ways that he is best known and in new ways that we might, when we look more closely at his work, I argue, think of his work now. Pistoletto is perhaps best known as an artist associated with, and in many ways the progenitor of, Arte Povera, a term that means ‘poor’ or ‘impoverished art.’ Arte Povera was a loose avant-garde movement of primarily Italian artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose work was characterized by a use of then-unconventional ephemeral and inexpensive materials, a rejection of representation and the commodification of signature artistic style, and an interest in merging art and life. Coined by the now-late Italian curator and critic Germano Celant in 1967, Arte Povera was quite varied in its practices and is best understood as one theoretical and curatorial (and now historical, if still critically important) framework for these artists’ works. Close study of individual practices during that time and beyond, across the broader arc of these artists’ careers, often reveals other histories and different ways to understand their work. I think this is the case for Pistoletto, whose work, despite its centrality to the theorization of the movement, was often quite at odds with Arte Povera’s historical framing, perhaps most importantly in his career-long use of the image of the human figure and interest in figuration as a system of representation.”