Arte povera - Pinault collection

Exhibition Catalogue Arte Povera, presented at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris (9 october 20024 - 20 january 2025).

The catalogue explains both the Italian birth and the international emanation of the Arte Povera movement through works by the thirteen main protagonists : Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio.

“In the mid-1960s, a certain number of Italian artists, mainly from Turin, Genoa, Bologna, Milan, and Rome, gave rise to a body of work that is original, free-spirited, utterly unconventional, and non-dogmatic, one that expanded the domains of painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, and which created the first ‘installations’ in art history, as well as performance works and actions.

By using simple materials and techniques, these artists have created installations involving the viewer in the work itself. By privileging elements that are ‘natural’ and ‘rural’ (such as soil, potatoes, lettuce, water, coal, trees, and the living bodies of animals and humans), as well as ‘artificial’ and ‘urban’ (elements found in hardware stores such as stainless steel plates, lead ingots, light bulbs, wood beams, and neon tubes), their works trigger flows of physical, chemical, and even psychic energy, drawing on notions of memory and emotion to engage their viewers”, says the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, an internationally recognised specialist of this artistic movement.