From October 1975 to September 1976 Pistoletto staged twelve consecutive exhibitions in the new spaces of the Galleria Christian Stein in Turin (three rooms connected by three doors all in a line and similar in size to the Mirror Paintings). Each show lasted for a month and was announced in advance by a text written by the artist. This series of exhibitions, entitled “The Rooms” [“Le stanze”], constituted the first of what would be called “continents of time”, conceived as an “encounter with others in the dimension of time, understood as acceptance of the events of life, extended effectively in practice as a series of actions in different places and between different people. From his own family to the students with whom he works constantly, from the people of a village to those of the big city” (Bruno Corà).
The next ones would be White Year [Anno bianco] (1989) and Happy Turtle [Tartaruga felice] (1993). The exhibition “Continents of Time” at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon (2001), would be devoted to this specific aspect of Pistoletto’s work.
The linking of the creative process and the dimension of time is, moreover, something that occurs over and over again in Pistoletto’s work. In addition to the examples mentioned at other points in this chronology, these include All the Women [Tutte le donne] held at the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan in 1970, where over the course of the month-long exhibition Pistoletto and Maria Pioppi painted the blank canvases that had been displayed in the gallery at its beginning, and The Time of the Mirror [Le temps du miroir] at Le Magasin in Grenoble in 1986, where over the course of a month Pistoletto covered the 680 square meters of the exhibition space’s walls with black lines made with broken pieces of charcoal. |
