Arte Povera

It was in 1967 that critic Germano Celant defined as Arte Povera (poor art) the work of thirteen young Italian artists. Through sculpture and installation they explored the relation between art and life as it is made manifest through nature, elemental matter or cultural artefacts, and experienced through the body. Their innovative works are lyrical, open-ended combinations of unlikely fragments: a slab of marble with a lettuce, or fruit scattered amongst neon tubes, giving the most banal materials a metaphysical dimension.

First exhibiting together in Italy in the late 1960s, artists 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 is still strongly resonant. Rome-based critic and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has written extensively on these artists. Her acute aestheticism brings the book to life: it embodies the essential in-depth survey of this groundbreaking movement, in a compilation that is as beautifully presented as it is intellectually rigorous.

Survey Christov-Bakargiev's introductory essay covers all the key dates, players and issues of Arte Povera.
 
Works provides an extensive colour plate section with extended captions for every artwork. Starting with 'Group Exhibitions', a chapter is then devoted to works by each of the key members, including Emilio Prini's artist's project created especially for this book.

Documents includes selected seminal writings by founding critic Germano Celant as well as contemporaneous and retrospective documents by leading thinkers, writers, artists, curators and practitioners - Jean-Christophe Ammann, Umberto Eco, Rudi Fuchs, R. D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Harold Rosenberg among others.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a writer and curator living in Rome, who has become an internationally recognized scholar of late twentieth-century Italian art. She has written extensively on the Arte Povera movement and published interviews and texts on artists such as Boetti, Pistoletto, Merz, Fabro and Kounellis. Bakargiev is also a noted curator of contemporary art internationally: her exhibitions include 'Molteplici Culture', Rome, 1992 and a homage to John Cage which she co-curated with Alanna Heiss for the 1993 Venice Biennale.

She was part of the curatorial team for the 'Antwerp 93 European Capital of Culture', devising the major international survey, 'On Taking a Normal Situation and Re-translating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present'. In 1996 Bakargiev curated a large-scale survey on Italian post-war artist Alberto Burri in Rome, Brussels and Munich. In 1997, she curated 'Citta-Natura': a city-wide exhibition of international artists including Anselmo, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pascali and Kounellis, held in Rome.

She is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and was formerly Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. She was co-curator, with Iwona Blazwick, of ‘Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2004–5.

'Phaidon's Themes and Movements series seeks to provide the late 20th -century art history books of the future.' (Art Monthly)

'This is now the definitive English-language sourcebook on Merz, Pistoletto, Paolini and company, thanks to its rich selection of images and texts.' (Bookforum)

'Get hold of Arte Povera ... it is both compendium and critique, with artists' statements, a chronology and commentary. It contextualizes the work, and the pictures are great.' (Adrian Searle, Guardian)