Michelangelo Pistoletto: Mirror of Eternity

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s long engagement with the mirror as a site of reflection and participation expands into the digital realm with an installation that merges technology, portraiture and viewer presence. The work situates each participant within a continually shifting field of images, extending his decades-long inquiry into how identity appears, changes and interacts through art.

The Mirror of Eternity is on view at The Bass on Miami Beach from November 20 through July 1. Presented by DMINTI, the exhibition invites visitors to upload their portraits into a system that fuses each image with another, generating a new face that exists only within the artwork. The process echoes Pistoletto’s historic Mirror Paintings of the 1960s, which placed the viewer directly within the pictorial space, and draws a line to Plagio (1971), a lightbox work combining transparent photographs of Pistoletto and Vettor Pisani to create a hybrid, virtual likeness.

Framed as an exploration of renewal and shared humanity, the installation raises questions about selfhood, memory and the persistence of identity in virtual space. Through ongoing digital recombination, participants become part of a constantly evolving composition that reflects Pistoletto’s interest in collaboration, transformation and the interplay between the physical and the virtual in contemporary artistic practice.