Arte povera

Arte povera was a radical Italian art movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and non traditional ‘everyday’ materials

Arte povera means literally ‘poor art’ but the word poor here refers to the movement’s signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, bronze, or carved marble. Materials used by the artists included soil, rags and twigs. In using such throwaway materials they aimed to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system.

The term was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. When referring to arte povera, Celant wasn’t really talking about a lack of money, but rather about making art without the restraints of traditional practices and materials. 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. Arte povera emerged from within a network of urban cultural activity in these cities as Italy was seized by economic instability.

Leading artists were 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. They worked in many different ways. They painted, sculpted, took photographs and made performances and installations, creating works of large physical presence as well as small-scale gestures.

Influence of arte povera

The heyday of the movement was from 1967–1972, but its influence on later art has been enduring. It can also be seen as the Italian contribution to conceptual art. In Japan, the mono-ha group looked into the essence of materials and stepped away from technological modernism. In the United States, the terms anti-form and post-minimalism were used to describe work that rejected the fixed industrial shapes and sleek forms of minimalist sculpture.

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Anti-form

Anti-form is a term associated with a group of artists working in the United States in the late 1960s who embraced chance and other organic processes in the creation of their minimal sculptures
Mono-ha

Mono-ha (School of Things) was a pioneering art movement that emerged in Tokyo in the mid-1960s whose artists, instead of making traditional representational artworks, explored materials and their properties in reaction to what they saw as ruthless development and industrialisation in Japan
Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

Explore this term

Left Right

'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
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
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."
Turn left for the revolution

Hari Kunzru

When Jacques-Louis David allowed his famous painting The Death of Marat 1793–4 to be used in support of the Republican cause in France, he changed the meaning and power of the image forever. Since then artists’ left-wing political values have variously influenced the making of art and visual culture, from William Morris’s emphasis on hand-production values to the anonymously designed Atelier Populaire posters of 1968. To coincide with Tate Liverpool’s ground-breaking exhibition Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making – the first to explore the impact of the Left on the production and reception of art from the French Revolution to the present day – writer Hari Kunzru charts the rich mix of artist voices and ideas across the centuries