Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella, Italy in 1933. In 1962, he produced Quadri Specchianti (Mirror Paintings), for which he received international recognition. Between 1965 and 1966, he produced the Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), considered fundamental to the birth of the Arte Povera movement. In the 1990s, he founded the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. That same year, he won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale for Lifetime Achievement. In 2004, the University of Turin awarded him an honorary degree in political science. In that same year the artist announced the most recent phase of his work, Terzo Paradiso (Third Paradise). In 2007, in Jerusalem, he was awarded the Wolf Foundation Prize for the Arts, “for his consistently inventive career as an artist, educator and activist, whose ceaseless intelligence has created visionary art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world”. In 2013, the Louvre in Paris hosted his solo exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre (Michelangelo Pistoletto, Year 1: Earthly Paradise). That same year, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo. In 2017, he took part in the 57th Venice Biennale with Un et un font trois (One and one make three), a collateral event at the Basilica of San Giorgio. In December 2022, the artist published his latest book, La formule de la création (Formula of Creation), in which he retraced the fundamental stages and evolution of his entire artistic career and his theoretical thinking. His works can be found in the world’s leading museums of modern and contemporary art.
Pascale Marthine Tayou (Nkongsamba, Cameroon, 1966) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium and Yaoundé, Cameroon. Since the 1990s, Tayou has been practising an art that knows no boundaries, that is intuitive and hybrid, mixing and assembling objects taken from her everyday life. Through a multitude of media and forms – drawings, installations, texts, performances, photographs, videos and sculptures – he diverts these objects from their original purpose. He transforms them and “relocates” them in new, sensitive situations where the world is seen in terms of social, cultural and political constructs which he sets out to thwart. In this spirit of deconstructing established models, Tayou added an “e” to his two first names very early on. By adding this feminine ending, he ironically distances himself from the question of artistic paternity and the attributes associated with masculinity/femininity. The artist has taken part in many major international art exhibitions and events, including the Gwangju Biennial (1997 and 1999), the Santa Fe Biennial (1997), the Sydney Biennial (1997), the Havana Biennial (1997 and 2006), the Liverpool Biennial (1999), the Berlin Biennial (2001), the Sao Paulo Biennial (2002), the Munster Biennial (2003), the Istanbul Biennial (2003), the Lyon Biennial (2000 and 2005), the Venice Biennial (2005 and 2009) and the Documenta 11 Biennial (2002), and has exhibited his work in museums around the world.
