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The Third Paradise

by Michelangelo Pistoletto

A new infinity sign to symbolize the birth of the Third Paradise.

What is the Third Paradise according to the author’s concept? It’s the fertile coupling of the first and second paradise. The first was the Earthly Paradise that came before the eating of the apple. It’s the natural paradise where everything is regulated by the intelligence of nature.

The second is the Artificial Paradise, the one developed by human intelligence, by means of a very slow process that has reached an increasingly vast and exclusive dimension in the last two centuries. This paradise is made up of artificial needs, artificial comforts, artificial pleasures and every other sort of artifice.

Confronted by the universal problem of humanity’s survival, the artist conceived the global project entitled Third Paradise. The biblical reference does not have any religious purpose, but is used to give force and meaning to the concept of responsible social change and to fuel a high ideal that unites, in a single endeavour, the arts, the sciences, economics, spirituality and politics.

About the Author: Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian artist and art theorist. Acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian ‘Arte Povera’, his work deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a universal artwork. In the mid-1960s the art dealer Ileana Sonnabend introduced him to Europe and the US. His work was awarded a grand prize at the Biennale de Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 1967. He won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His works are exhibited permanently in several museums: the MOMA and Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Smithsonian Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, Paris’s Beaubourg, the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid, the Tate Modern in London, and others.

ISBN: 9788831706490