Arte Povera

It was in 1967 that Italian art critic Germano Celant coined the term Arte Povera to describe the work of a generation of young Italian artists. Emerging alongside such international movements as Land Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Arte Povera used a simple 'poverty' of gestures and materials - twigs, metals, glass, fabric, stone, even live animals - to turn away from traditional 'high' art. The Arte Povera artists explored the relation between art and life as it is made manifest in natural processes or cultural dynamics. First exhibiting together in Italy in the late 1960s, 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 went on to become internationally renowned. Bridging the natural and the artificial, the urban and the rural, Mediterranean life and Western modernity, Arte Povera's impact still resounds. Critic and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is one of the world's leading authorities on post-war Italian art and culture. She collaborated directly with many of the artists in the making of this book, which is the most comprehensive survey available.