Arte povera 1968 at MAMbo (Bologna, Italy)

Arte povera 1968
Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo)
24 September – 26 December, 2011

MAMbo is proud to announce, starting September 24th, the exhibition-event Arte Povera 2011, curated by Germano Celant, which will involve several leading Italian institutions and museums between September 2011 and April 2012: MAMbo, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Turin), Triennale (Milan), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (Rome), MADRE Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (Naples), GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Bergamo), Teatro Margherita (Bari).
· 250 spectacular installations by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio, created between 1966 and 2011 and presented in 8 leading cultural institutions. The works by Arte Povera protagonists will be integrated by over 50 sculptures, videos, installations, photographs and films by international artists such as Acconci, Andre, Baldessari, Beuys, Kosuth, Le Witt, Nauman, Smithson and Weiner.
· Over 15.000 square meters of exhibition spaces devoted to Arte Povera, among which museum architectures and urban contexts in Italy’s main cities, from north to south: Turin-Rivoli, Milan, Bergamo, Bologna, Rome, Naples, Bari.
· 7 months of spectacular exhibitions between September 2011 and April 2012
· A catalog integrating the project’s range and complexity in over 600 pages, 580 illustrations and 33 original essays by international writers

These are but the figures of a show whose breadth, contents and structure make it the most ambitious exhibition project ever devoted to this key movement in contemporary Italian art

Arte povera started in the late Sixties, in a synergy with the emancipation movements and the protests characterizing an age whose main trait was the liberation from social conventions and the status quo. Critic Germano Celant noted how some artists pursued a “linguistic split”, shifting their interest from forms toward processes, from aesthetics to intentions, from objects to gestures, from a work’s self-contained space to the infinite potential of time and experience. The name derives from “poor” [povero] theater, as theorized by Grotowski, and references the strategy of reducing (impoverishing) signs, in a search for what is primary and essential. This was also an attempt at backing out from the constant accumulation of traditions, returning centrality to mankind instead of granting it to its products. Arte Povera rejected cultural sediments and hence was unwilling to present itself as an avant-garde; already in 1971, Celant decreed the movement’s end, its disintegration into the individual artists’ experiences, each of them developing a specific path with a particular attention to materials, conceptual apparatuses, formal disaggregation and recombination, behavioral practices, poetic activity: all these aspects now define what has come to be seen as a
conventional way of understanding contemporary art.