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Tate Modern Exhibition

Zero to infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972

31 May – 19 August 2001
To Turn One's Eyes Inside Out Giuseppe Penon

Giuseppe PenoneTo Turn One's Eyes Inside Out 1970

Photo: Paolo Mussat Sartor

To Turn One's Eyes Inside Out Giuseppe Penon

To Turn One's Eyes Inside Out Giuseppe Penon

The term 'Arte Povera' was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. His pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for a number of young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. They were working in radically new ways, breaking with the past and entering a challenging dialogue with trends in Europe and America. Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972 examines the work of fourteen key artists: Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio.

As the Italian miracle of the post-war years collapsed into a chaos of economic and political instability, Arte Povera erupted from within a network of urban cultural activity. This exhibition encompasses a decade that opened with the birth of this energetic scene and closed with the emergence of these artists as individuals of significance within an international arena.

As opposed to endorsing a distinctive style, Arte Povera described a process of open-ended experimentation. In the wake of the iconoclastic artistic innovations of Italian precursors Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, artists were able to begin from a zero point, working outside formal limitations. Arte Povera therefore denotes not an impoverished art, but an art made without restraints, a laboratory situation in which a theoretical basis was rejected in favour of a complete openness towards materials and processes.

The artists associated with Arte Povera worked in many different ways. They painted, sculpted, took photographs and made performances and installations, creating works of immense physical presence as well as small-scale, ephemeral gestures. They employed materials both ancient and modern, man-made and 'raw', revealing the elemental forces locked within them as well as the fields of energy that surround us. They explored the context of art-making itself, and the space of the gallery, as well as the world beyond the gallery, reflecting on the relationship between art and life. Essentially, they placed the viewer at the centre of a discussion about experience and meaning.

Contemporary artists continue to operate on ground that was cleared by Arte Povera. To revisit Arte Povera at its moment of genesis is thus to explore the history of the present and the beginning of now.

Tate Modern

Bankside
London SE1 9TG
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Dates

31 May – 19 August 2001

Find out more

  • Alighiero Boetti exhibition at Tate Modern

    Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

    2012 exhibtion at Tate Modern of artist and key member of the Arte Povera group, Alighiero e Boetti

  • Alighiero Boetti in the Studio

    Alighiero Boetti in the Studio film, Tate Modern 17 & 22 April 2012

  • Boetti with Manifesto 1967 in 1970

    Giving time to time

    Mark Godfrey

    One of the most important and influential Italian artists of the twentieth century, Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) is renowned for the extraordinary diversity of his works. The curator of his Tate retrospective discovers ‘a world of fascinating ideas, playful and critical, political and poetic’, as he explores an oeuvre that encompassed a consuming interest in numeric, linguistic and classificatory systems – games, numbers, words, dates and sequences – in the artist’s dual role as divine shaman and public showman, and in geopolitics, which resulted in him setting up the One Hotel in Kabul and employing local craftswomen to create large embroidered maps

  • Illustrated letter sent by Alighiero e Boetti to Hans Ulrich Obrist

    'One of the most important days in my life'

    Hans Ulrich Obrist

    A long-term friend remembers his first encounter with the artist at the age of eighteen, and the subsequent effect this meeting had on the way he looks at art to this day

  • Photograph by a street photographer of Francesco Clemente with Alighiero e Boetti on the final day of their travels through Afghanistan 1974

    On the road to a state of grace

    Brooks Adams

    As Adams writes: "This is a tale of four contemporary art shamans, in a pre-9/11 world that could still entertain rosy illusions of prelapsarian time and space."

  • Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni

    Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni: Press related to past Tate exhibition.

  • Artist

    Alighiero e Boetti

    1940–1994
  • Artist

    Lucio Fontana

    1899–1968
  • Artist

    Giovanni Anselmo

    1934–2023
  • Artist

    Luciano Fabro

    1936–2007
  • Artist

    Jannis Kounellis

    1936–2017
  • Artist

    Mario Merz

    1925–2003
  • Artist

    Marisa Merz

    1926–2019
  • Artist

    Giulio Paolini

    born 1940
  • Artist

    Pino Pascali

    1935–1968
  • Artist

    Giuseppe Penone

    born 1947
  • Artist

    Michelangelo Pistoletto

    born 1933
  • Artist

    Gilberto Zorio

    born 1944
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