Arte Povera

About

In Michelangelo Pistoletto's Venus of the Rags (1967), a cast of a classical nude faces a heap of cast-off clothing. It sums up Arte Povera, the “poor art” named by the critic Germano Celant in 1967: old against new, permanence against waste, high culture against everyday things.

Based mainly in Turin and Rome, the artists worked with earth, coal, wax, rags, glass, neon, stone, plants and living animals. Giovanni Anselmo bound a lettuce between granite blocks, so that the work changed as it wilted. Mario Merz built igloos and traced the Fibonacci sequence in neon. Giuseppe Penone cast his own hand in bronze gripping a young tree, which grew around it. Jannis Kounellis brought twelve live horses into a Rome exhibition space in 1969. Marisa Merz knitted with copper wire, and Alighiero Boetti had world maps embroidered in Afghanistan. Look for materials that are fragile, heavy or alive.