Michelangelo Pistoletto — Avant et Après l’Arte Povera — Galleria Continua / Paris Marais — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Starts today: October 16, 2026 → January 16, 2027

GALLERIA CONTINUA is pleased to present, in its Marais exhibition space, in the heart of Paris, the solo exhibition of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Avant et après l’Arte Povera.

Michelangelo Pistoletto is not only an Arte Povera artist, but one of the protagonists of the movement that Germano Celant theorised and defined in 1967. Arte Povera represents only one stage within a practice that now spans seventy years. Pistoletto’s artistic path began earlier and, above all, has continued to develop along a trajectory of its own. To tie him exclusively to Arte Povera would be to reduce the complexity and breadth of a practice that has continually transformed the relationship between art, the individual and society.

In Pistoletto’s artistic history, there is a before and an after. These are not two separate moments, but successive phases of a practice that, through radical transformations, has laid the foundations of what is now his oeuvre. Or, if it is simply called a “work”, perhaps that is precisely where the question begins.

His oeuvre may be better understood as a civic and cultural project: a body of thought and action that has progressively placed at its centre the good of humanity, the ability to recognise and embrace differences, and the search for a balance between nature and artifice, individual and community. Through art, Pistoletto seeks to contribute to what he calls a possible “preventive peace”.

The exhibition brings together key moments from this development, not simply to recount the history of an artist, but to explore how, through his work, Pistoletto came to question the world and the ways in which we might inhabit it together. Spanning the 1950s to the present, it highlights his continual renewal of artistic language while maintaining a sustained reflection on the role of art within society. The title of the exhibition emphasises that Arte Povera constitutes one moment within a much broader seventy-year history.