A labyrinth at Milan's Palazzo Reale: Michelangelo Pistoletto's new exhibition installation

From March 23 to June 4, 2023, Palazzo Reale in Milan, in the Sala delle Cariatidi, presents Michelangelo Pistoletto ’s installation exhibition La Pace Preventiva, designed specifically for the evocative setting. Curated by Fortunato D’Amico and promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan Culture, Palazzo Reale, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in collaboration with Skira, the exhibition is part of Milano Art Week, the widespread event coordinated by the Milan City Council Culture Department, in collaboration with miart, which will be held from April 11 to 16, 2023, and which networks the city’s main public institutions and private foundations dealing with modern and contemporary art, with a dedicated schedule of exhibitions and activities.

Designed to extend in a wave-like motion over the entire surface of the exhibition space, the installation intends to immerse the visitor in a fluid environment that takes on the characteristic of a labyrinth, within which spaces open up to accommodate some of Pistoletto’s most significant works throughout his career.

Preventive Peace is not only an exhibition of a series of works produced at different moments in time, but is also meant to be a trace of the itinerary of awareness that has gradually enabled the artist to conceive “art at the center of a responsible transformation of society” an expression that constitutes the mission of his foundation, Cittadellarte, active as a school in Biella since the 1990s. A change that is possible, according to Michelangelo Pistoletto, only through a real practice of democracy that involves citizens and their organizations in processes of responsible social transformation.

The labyrinth is one of the oldest archetypes of travel and personal transformation. Its presence is widespread on five continents. A symbol rich in cryptic meanings with many facets and interpretations, all justified and consistent, varying according to ages and cultures.

As early as 1969, Michelangelo Pistoletto designed his first Labyrinth at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Inside the installation three members of Lo Zoo, a multidisciplinary art group founded by Michelangelo Pistoletto himself the previous year, perform performative actions by playing long megaphones used as if they were trumpets. In the following years, the Labyrinth will be repurposed in other exhibitions, each time adapted to its host environment.

“The Labyrinth is a highly symbolic place. The legend of the Minotaur stands for the monster that lives within us and the possibility that all of us, at some time in our private lives of our collective lives, will be forced to face ourselves. My labyrinth is made of corrugated cardboard, a flexible material that allows it to take any shape and fit into any space. In a sense it is like the mirror that accommodates any image. It presents itself as a physical element that is at the same time strongly linked to the imagination” (M. Pistoletto, interview with G. Celant in Michelangelo Pistoletto. The Mirror of Judgement, exhibition catalog, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2011).

At the Royal Palace, the public will be invited to take a sinuous and only seemingly disorienting route, walking inside the Labyrinth. In this “laborious contraption of art” at each fork in the path he will necessarily have to choose the route to take to reach the other works on display, pause in front of them and reflect on their existence. Upon exiting the installation he will take with him the memory of an experience rich in imaginative content and practical information, but also the knowledge that he has completed a tangible, effective exercise in reflecting on ways to get out of the labyrinth of our age and establish The Preventive Peace.

The Sala delle Cariatidi welcomes the voice of Cittadellarte through QR codes that activate video testimonies of all the activities of this school of interaction between art and different sectors of society, from education to food, from architecture to fashion, from spirituality to politics.

The exhibition is extended with three installations in the Science Museums of the City of Milan, Museum of Natural History, Planetarium and Civic Aquarium, which will host a series of in-depth meetings during the months when the exhibition itself is open. Peace thus becomes the fil rouge of a cultural plan carried out within the social labyrinth, helping to avoid uncertainties before the crossroads of decisions and take the road of harmony instead of the one that leads down the path of contrast and conflict.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s exhibition is also meant to be a double homage to Pablo Picasso. Seventy years ago, in 1953, in the very Sala delle Cariatidi still burdened by the signs of the wartime conflict caused by World War II, Pablo Picasso exhibited one of his most important masterpieces, Guernica. Looking intently at the large canvas, the audience could imagine hearing the devastating screams of the victims of the terrorist bombing carried out on the Basque town of Guernica and seeing along with the bodies torn apart by the weapons, the head of the Minotaur, the monster that dominates the labyrinth scene, emerge.

To create the image-logo of The Preventive Peace also, Pistoletto takes on the drawing of Manish Paul, a Vinci Secondary School student who replaced the olive branch of Picasso’s dove with the sign of the Third Paradise, winning the “Educating for Peace: Leonardo, Picasso, Pistoletto” award in the 2014-2015 school year.

For info: www.palazzorealemilano.it

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Image: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Labyrinth (1969-2022). Courtesy of Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto.

A labyrinth at Milan's Palazzo Reale: Michelangelo Pistoletto's new exhibition installation

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