Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. In the two-year period 1961-1962 made the first Mirror Paintings, which brought Pistoletto international acclaim. In 1965 and 1966 he produced a set of works considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement of which Pistoletto was an animating force and a protagonist. During the nineties, with Project Art and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he brought art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003 he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004 the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise. In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world.” In 2013 the Louvre in Paris hosted his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. In this same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, in Tokyo. In 2015, he realizes a work of big dimensions, called Rebirth, situated in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. His works of art are exhibited in mayor collections of the most important contemporary and modern art museums around the world.