Arte povera

In 1967 critic Germano Celant defined the work of 13 young Italian artists as Arte Povera. Through sculpture and installation they explored the relation between art and life as made manifest through nature, elemental matter or cultural artefacts, and experienced via the body. Their innovative works are lyrical, open-ended combinations of unlikely fragments - a slab of marble with a lettuce, or fruit scattered among neon tubes - giving the most banal materials a metaphysical dimension. First exhibiting together in Italy in the late 1960s, Anselmo, Boetti, Calzolari, Fabro, Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Paolini, Pascali, Penone, Pistoletto, Prini and 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.