Salvo (artist)  Salvatore Mangione, known as Salvo (22 May 1947 – 12 September 2015), was an Italian artist who lived and worked in Turin. Salvo (real name Salvatore Mangione) was born in Leonforte, in the province of Enna in 1947. In 1956 he and his family moved from Catania to Turin, which always remained his adoptive city. In the early 1960s he began painting and supported himself by selling low-priced portraits, landscapes and copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. In 1963 he participated in the 121st Esposizione della Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti with a drawing after Leonardo.   1968-1972  Between September and December 1968, the artist was in Paris, swept off his feet by the cultural climate of the student protests. After returning to Turin, he began spending time with the artists involved in the Arte Povera movement, whose point of reference was the gallery owned by Gian Enzo Sperone. He met Boetti; they became friends and shared a studio until 1971. He also met Mario and Marisa Merz, Paolini, Penone, Pistoletto, Zorio, as well as the critics Renato Barilli, Germano Celant, and Achille Bonito Oliva. In 1969 he got involved with the American Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, and Sol LeWitt. In the summer he embarked on his first long journey to Afghanistan, to be followed by others. He began making works that already clearly showed up the themes—the search for the Self, narcissistic self-satisfaction, the relationship with the past and with the history of culture—that became an essential part of his later research. These included the photograph "Autoritratto come Raffaello" and the "12 autoritratti" series where he mounted his own face on images taken from newspapers, shown at the Sperone Gallery in 1970 for his first solo show. In parallel with his photographic works, Salvo made marble panels on which he carved words or sentences, such as "Idiota", "Respirare il padre", "Io sono il migliore". Although the works were developed within the context of the Arte Povera movement, their monumental and archaicizing connotations reveal their unique nature and foreshadow the artist’s future research. "Salvo è vivo" was made in 1970, and it is now exhibited at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and at the Neues Museum in Weimar.