Michelangelo Pistoletto Debuts Five New Mirror Works in First-Ever Solo Exhibition in St. Moritz

Should the thought of St. Moritz as a place of worship ever occur to anyone, it’s most likely for the gilded rituals of its awe-inspiring ski slopes, and the candlelit celebrations of dynastic wealth enjoyed for generations there. But rising above the well-trafficked via Maistra in the fashionable center also stands a graceful, plainspoken Reformed Protestant church, erected in the 18th century to the glory of an austere God, and currently repurposed as a Swiss outpost for the Robilant + Voena gallery.

As Old Master dealers who expanded into modern and contemporary art, and from London to Paris, New York to Milan, and the Alpine luxury resort, partners Edmondo di Robilant and Marco Voena have developed a distinguished stable of international artists. Now on view through March 4 is “Michelangelo Pistoletto,” a first solo exhibition for this leading light of the Italian arte povere movement in St. Moritz.

Five signature mirror works, new additions this year to the “Color and Light” series initiated in 2014, produce large-scale splashes of color and reflected light along the gallery’s soaring white walls. Centered in the domed space on one end is a sixth new piece, from the “Black and Light” series begun in 2007, which, hung slightly elevated above the rest, assumes an altar-like appearance. Reinforcing this on the other is conTatto, from 2017, a small silkscreen print on steel of a hand outstretched in the manner of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s Sistine Chapel and its “Creation of Adam.” Together they fleetingly reintroduce a devotional aura to a high-stakes commercial showcase, where on any given day an Agnelli or two, some Alpine ski royalty, a flock of Schnabels, or a fillip of scandal may pass through the doors.

The exhibition, organized with the support of Galleria Continua, notes Pistoletto’s nomination last year for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his commitment to art as a communal catalyst for social change. The interplay between the show and its landmark venue is far from random. The relationship, says Edmondo di Robilant, is profoundly organic, “because Pistoletto specifically created the works for this church.” Growing up in the Piedmont had also imprinted on his sensibilities a dramatic landscape drawn perennially upward toward the Alps. As an introduction to St. Moritz, di Robilant says, the show is particularly meaningful to an artist “very tied both physically and spiritually to the mountains.”

The 92-year-old artist’s wider sense of reverence—for the artmaking process, creative collaboration, and humble materials like the sinuous painted jute combined in his compositions with interlocking sections of black and white mirror—represents a kind of birthright. An apprenticeship at 14 in his father’s well-known art restoration workshop in Turin exposed him to a deep respect for artistic tradition. Yet, awakening to Italy’s roiling foment of the 1960s, he helped animate the defiant tenets of arte povera and its radical embrace of methodologies and materials historically anathema to high culture and its artistry.

Admission was granted to ordinary soil, breakable bricks, rags, twigs, and, most prominently in Pistoletto’s case, stainless steel, a metal appropriated from industrial production. Later came the mirrored glass found in his more recent work. The mirroring effect reversed the act of looking for viewers, throwing Renaissance perspective into disarray, and fragmenting into an imagery of the fractured self. At Robilant + Voena, the outsize gilded wood frames surrounding the mirror works kick the existential dialogue up another level, juxtaposing dressy, old-school formality and the pugnacious pursuit of a durable avant-garde. Above the installation, as the windows carved into the architecture of the venerable church funnel in winter’s precious light, an enduring radiance emanates from the tribute to Pistoletto assembled there

“Michelangelo Pistoletto” is on view in St. Moritz through March 4