Michelangelo Pistoletto considers the first figurative human experience to be the recognition of one’s own image in a mirror. This notion inspired an exploration of self-portraiture that characterized his work from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Pistoletto’s first selfportraits, painted on canvas, sought to express both the image suggested by the mirror and the image that he himself imagined. These works were then followed, in 1960, by life-size self-portraits on monochrome backgrounds of gold, silver and copper.