The Magazzino Italian Art Museum and Study Center in Cold Spring, New York, has opened an exhibit titled "Welcome to New York!" by Michelangelo Pistoletto to celebrate the artist's 90th birthday. The museum also presented Terzo paradiso, a permanent work on earth that was made after the artist, Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, the founders of Magazzino, waited 20 years for the ideal conditions to fit the concept of the work and the artist's long relationship with them. Terzo paradiso is a manifesto that looks like an infinity sign with an extra circle in the middle. The two circles at the ends represent nature and man-made, while the sphere in the middle represents rebirth and a bright future. Soon after Terzo paradiso was conceived in 2003, Olnick and Spanu became its advocates. Magazzino joined them in 2017 but they hadn't yet found the right time to make it happen.
While digging for the base of a new building that will open in September, the team discovered several boulders of the same size, with a diameter of one meter. Magazzino then discovered that the area had been a mine in the past. "I knew we had to keep the rocks," Spanu says. "They were used to build roads a long time ago, so their goal was to create a new future. It struck me because that's one of the points of Pistoletto in Terzo paradiso, and that's also why we were digging in the first place: to build a new building."
When they had enough rocks, they built the work on a slope of the hill above Magazzino so that people could see it from the ground. “The stones represent the natural, and the way they were discovered through human intervention and excavation represents the man-made,” Spanu explains. "The third circle, which is part of Terzo paradiso, represents a rebirth, just like our new building represents a rebirth. But there can be no rebirth without a birth, and that's what you can see inside of the museum, the story of how we got to where we are now with Pistoletto." Throughout "Welcome to New York!", this story is told.
Selena Mattei