"Arte Povera" Or "arme Kunst".

The term 'Arte Povera' was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967.

As a critic, his revolutionary texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for thirteen young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome.

Artists

Anselmo, Boetti, Calzolari, Fabro, Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Paolini, Pascali, Penone, Pistoletto, Prini and Zorio

These artists involved in Arte Povera were only loosely associated. Their shared concerns were innovation and experimentation as well as a profound desire to move beyond the omnipresent shadows of the Renaissance and Baroque masters.

First exhibiting together in Italy in the late 1960s, artists went on to become internationally renowned.

Exploring Art Style
If the Arte Povera movement was poor in anything, it was poor in an interest in the history of fine art and its inherent elitism. 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. Anita Gibson’s basic art made of materials of nails and canvas is really awesome. In this work, the rusting process and the beat of the placement of the glued on nails join to make a painting in a more traditional manner.

They were working in radically new ways, breaking with the past and entering a challenging dialogue with trends in Europe and America.

Through sculpture and installation they explored the relation between art and life as it is made manifest through nature, elemental matter or cultural artifacts, and experienced through the body.

Bridging the natural and the artificial, the urban and the rural, Mediterranean life and Western modernity, Arte Poveras impact still resounds.