Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Photo gallery - Michelangelo Pistoletto - Royal Palace

Milan, March 22 2023 – "Preventive peace", an exhibition-installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto designed specifically for the Sala delle Cariatidi, will open to the public from tomorrow at Palazzo Reale, where it will remain on display until Sunday 4 June 2023.

Promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan - Culture, Palazzo Reale and Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in collaboration with Skira, the exhibition is curated by Fortunato D'Amico and is part of the schedule of "Milano Art week" (11÷16 April 2023), the widespread event coordinated by the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Milan, in collaboration with Miart, which brings together the main public institutions and private foundations of the city that deal with modern and contemporary art, with a dedicated program of exhibitions and activities .

"Preventive peace" is an immersive experience through the Labyrinth created by Michelangelo Pistoletto in the Sala delle Cariatidi: a disorienting journey through his works-installations which, by placing "art at the center of a responsible transformation of society", aims to lead visitors to the awareness of having to "take the path of harmony instead of the one that leads to contrast", averting wars and conflicts. On display are now iconic works such as "Venus of rags" (1967-2013), "The third Paradise – Weaver spider" (2003-2014), "Wollen - The reintegrated apple" (2007), "Mappamondo" (1966-2022) , "The dove of peace" (2015-2023).

"On the occasion of Michelangelo Pistoletto's 90th birthday, Milan dedicates a large exhibition to him in the most prestigious room of Palazzo Reale, the Sala delle Cariatidi – declares the councilor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi –. A long journey of research and discovery, a real Labyrinth in which visitors will be able to admire some of the main works created by the artist in over sixty years of research and activity. The homage continues in the city with three installations in as many civic museums: History Museum natural, Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium and Aquarium. A widespread artistic journey to reflect on the need to establish that preventive peace which is one of the figures of Pistoletto's poetics".

The Labyrinth, formed by the progressive unrolling of corrugated cardboard over the entire surface of the Hall of Caryatids, underlines the presence of the opposing duality between the monster and virtue. The curator of the exhibition Fortunato D'Amico comments: "Inside the labyrinth there is the monster, the predatory madness, the war. Its tortuous architectural structure is a complex of ideological walls, physical, economic, cultural barriers, open doors or locks articulated around a thicket of tangles that make orientation difficult. We must try to develop the ability to achieve virtue by moving away from the monster. It lives and exists in the labyrinths outside and inside us, but we cannot avoid facing it through a pre-ordained action, conducted within his usual residence. Only in this way will we be able to destroy him to establish the practice of preventive peace".

This is how Pistoletto recounts the birth of preventive peace and the Third Paradise: "It was March 2003, when Bush and Blair, supported by numerous governments, declared preventive war on Iraq. The circumstance caused me a profound disturbance. All the malformations cultural heritage inherited from the past came to a head: the very concept of preventive war gave rise to the urgent need to counteract the idea of ​​preventive Peace. In history, peace has always come following a war and has been considered as its result, therefore war hidden under the mask of peace and peace constituted by mere appearance. I understood in that moment that I myself, despite the artistic, intellectual and practical commitment, directed towards a responsible transformation of society, had to take a further, even more decisive step and effective, to contribute to the change of this humanity. This is how the sign of the Third Paradise was born."

Seventy years ago, in 1953, in the Hall of Caryatids still burdened by the signs of the war caused by the Second World War, Pablo Picasso exhibited the large canvas Guernica; in the context of the pictorial story we can glimpse the head of the Minotaur, the same monster that dominates the scene of today's labyrinth. In 1961 the Spanish artist designed the Dove of Peace, the same one that the student Manish Paul, from the Vinci secondary school, winner of the "Educating for peace: Leonardo, Picasso, Pistoletto" prize in the 2014-2015 school year, would use, replacing the olive branch in the beak with the trinamic sign-symbol of the Third Paradise. Michelangelo Pistoletto takes on Manish Paul's design to create the logo-image of Preventive Peace.

Already in 1969, the artist designed his first Labyrinth at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterrdam. In the following years the installation was proposed again in various exhibitions and adapted to the environment that hosted it.

The route of Preventive peace from Palazzo Reale extends into the Milanese urban fabric with three other installations present in as many scientific museums in the city. For each of these venues, some of the artist's works have been carefully selected in accordance with the contents of which these institutions are promoting. The Civic Museum of Natural History of Milan hosts Adam and Eve, two historical works by the artist, created in silkscreen on supermirror stainless steel. The Self-portrait of stars is exhibited, in the new lightbox version, at the Ulrico Hoepli Civic Planetarium. The Civic Aquarium of Milan presents Mar Mediterraneo - Love difference chairs, an artistic composition signed by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Juan E. Sandoval which deals with the theme of water and opens up to extensive cultural, political, environmental dissertations, underway in the Mediterranean area thus like all over the world.