A comprehensive overview of one most important movements of Italian twentieth-century art opened yesterday at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea: ‘Arte Povera. Curated by Ingvild Goetz’. Coincident with the 50th anniversary of the movement, the exhibition presents 150 works from ‘i poveristi’, a group of Italian artists, spanning from the late 1950s to the 1990s, including Claudio Abate, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Giorgio Colombo, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Paolo Mussat Sartor, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio. The term 'Arte Povera' (Poor Art) was introduced by the art critic Germano Celant in 1967, grouping works by different Italian artists, characterized by the use of common materials including dirt, rocks, rope, paper, neon—or simple ready-made, without the Duchamp emphasis. The 'poveristi' rejected the notion of a unified movement, such as 'minimalism' or 'conceptualism' although several works can be associated to such art discourses.
