Arte Povera | The "Walking Sculpture" from the Streets to the Museum in Cold Spring

Arte Povera is definitely going through a renaissance. In the past three months there have been several exhibitions in New York and surrounding celebrating the Italian born art movement, coincidentally with its 50th anniversary—although it is difficult to pinpoint a birthday for something so fluid such a major art movement. In addition to the several major exhibitions in New York galleries,  yesterday Arte Povera has been celebrated in the quaint Hudson Valley village of Cold Springs (Putman County, NY) with the participatory performance "Walking Sculpture by Michelangelo Pistoletto.
     The "Walking Sculpture" is a sphere made of newspaper clips of current events and has been re-enacted for five decades worldwide, starting in 1967 with the sphere rolling through the streets of Turin. In Cold Springs the "Walking Sculpture" was transported by a red FIAT roadster and then rolled through the streets of the village by the artist, who was  joined by an enthusiastic crowd. Finally the sphere returned to its home at "Magazzino Italian Art" a small private museum near Cold Springs, founded by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu.

"Walking Sculpture" in Cold Springs

"Walking Sculpture" at Magazzino Italian Art

Michelangelo Pistoletto at Magazzino Italian Art, November 4 2017

Vernissages | "Arte Povera" in Chelsea, September 12 2017

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.

Vernissages NYC | Identity, Perception, Illusion: Michelangelo Pistoletto "Work"

 

Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the major exponents of Arte Povera, has been working with mirrors since 1961 --- in many media and expressions, from paintings to performances.
Mirrors have a complex semantics, spanning from psychoanalytical readings to explorations of visual perceptions. The exhibition  Lavoro (Italian word for work) includes new work of Pistoletto, where mirrored surfaces become backgrounds for trompe-l'œil imagery of people and tools from the construction work environment. The viewer's identity becomes lost in perceptions of illusionary environments, where the gallery becomes transformed in several construction sites. A double illusion, not only for the 2d representation of trompe-l'œil becoming allusive of three-dimensionality, but also for the places recreated.

Walk total length: 13.5km