Arte Povera
also: Poor art
Arte Povera - 'poor art' - was named by the critic Germano Celant in 1967 for a group of Italian artists who abandoned both polished pop imagery and pure abstraction. They worked with humble, unstable materials: earth, branches, rags, wax, neon, furniture, and occasionally living animals, placing them in charged juxtapositions that set nature against industry and the primordial against the modern. Turin and Rome were the centers, and artists like Merz, Anselmo, Kounellis, Boetti, and Pistoletto each built a distinct language within the loose grouping. Rejecting the commercial object, the movement treated art as an open process of relations, and through exhibitions staged internationally in the late 1960s it became one of the most influential tendencies of postwar European art.
Defining characteristics
- Humble, perishable materials: earth, twigs, cloth, wax, rags, glass
- Juxtapositions of nature and industry, the ancient and the modern
- Installation-scale arrangements that transform the whole room
- Real objects - furniture, food, animals - used unaltered and uncased
- Process and instability favored over the finished, saleable object
Key figures
- Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933) — Mirror paintings that fold the viewer and room into the work
- Mario Merz (1925-2003) — Igloo structures and neon-numbered spirals of nomadic forms
- Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017) — Raw materials and live horses staged as elemental presences
- Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) — Ordered systems - maps, embroideries, word squares - made with others
- Germano Celant (1940-2020) — Critic who named and theorized the movement in 1967
Example works
- Igloo series — Mario Merz (from 1968)
- Untitled (12 Horses) — Jannis Kounellis (1969)
- Mappa (Map) series — Alighiero Boetti (from 1971)
Sources
- Arte Povera - Wikipedia encyclopedia