The rise of "Poor Art" in Italy: around the years 1960’s in Italy a bunch of young artists choosen to create a new form of artworks using “poor” elements: shredded clothes, rags, wood, clay, plaster, rusted iron, straw, wicker etc... Step by step this strange use of elements evolved into an interesting develop of new languages. They were going across the “Pop Art” creating a new form of real popular Art, because of the use of household objects and common materials.

The pillar of this new language should be found inside “dadaism,” a provocative movement created in the early 20th century in Zurich and still respected, after WWII, by the modern artists.

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933) is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian “Poor Art.” His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and every­day life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Michelangelo Pistoletto be­gan painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. In the late sixties, he began bringing together rags with casts of omnipresent clas­sical statuary of Italy to break down the hierarchies of “art” and common things.

An art of impoverished materials is certainly one aspect of the de­finition of “poor art.” In his 1967 Muretto di stracci (Rag Wall), Pistoletto makes an exotic and opulent tape­stry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric. The work received a lot of feedback: Pistoletto, who started under the American influence of “post-pop art” and photorealism, was soon listed by gallery owners and critics in the catalogues as a significant representative of the novel, mostly Italian trend of the Arte Povera. Against the background of the 1968 student riots, Pistoletto withdrew his participation in the Venice Biennale.

In the following years, he dealt with conceptual ideas, which he presented in the book L’uomo nero (The Black Man, 1970). In 1974, he nearly completely withdrew from the art scene: he took an exam as a skiing instructor and spent most of his time in the mountains of San Sicario. At the end of the 1970s, he produced sculptures, heads, and torsos using polyurethane and marble. In doing so, he was a recipient of antique artifacts, and he furthermore pursued other performance and theatre projects—including those in the US in Athens, At­lanta, and San Francisco. At the beginning of the 1980s, he presented theatre works, such as Anno Uno (March 1981), in the Quirino Theatre in Rome. Since 1990, Pistoletto has been living and working in Turin.

Giuseppe Penone

Giuseppe Penone (1947) is an Italian artist and sculptor, known for his large-scale sculptures of trees that are interested in the link between man and the natural world. His early work is often associated with the Arte Povera movement. In 2014, Penone was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award. He currently lives and works in Turin, Italy. Penone’s sculptures, installations, and drawings are distinguished by his emphasis on process and his use of natural materials, such as clay, stone, metal, and wood. His work stri­ves to assimilate the natural world with his artistic practice, unifying art and nature.

More specifically, the tree, a living organism which closely resembles a human figure, is a recurring element in Penone’s oeuvre. Penone created his first Al­bero (“Tree”) sculpture in 1969, a series which continues to the present. Since this time, his practice has continued to explore and investigate the natural world and the poetic relationship between man and nature, artistic process and natu­ral process.

Gilberto Zorio

Gilberto Zorio (1944) is an Italian artist associated with the Italian “Poor Art” movement. Zorio’s artwork shows his fasci¬nation with natural processes, alchemical transformation, and the release of energy. His sculptures, paintings, and performan¬ces are often read as metaphors for revolutionary human action, transformation, and creativity. He is known for his use of ma¬terials including: incandescent electric light tubes, steel, pitch, motifs, and processes through the use of evaporation and oxidation. He also creates precarious instal¬lations using fragile materials such as Bronze Star and Acids within his work.

Mario Merz

Mario Merz (1925 – 2003) was an Italian artist and discarded abstract expressionism’s subjectivity in favor of opening art to exterior space: a seed or a leaf in the wind becomes a universe on his canvas. From the mid-1960s, his paintings echoed his desire to explore the transmission of energy from the organic to the inorganic, a curiosity that led him to create works in which neon lights pierced every­day objects, such as an umbrella, a glass, a bottle, or his raincoat. Without ever using ready-made objects as “things”, Merz and his companions drew the guiding lines of a renewed life for Italian art in the global context.

Giulio Paolini

Giulio Paolini (1940) is an Italian artist associated with both Poor Art and Conceptual Art and renewed life for Italian art in the global context. He did his first work in 1960, Disegno geometrico (Geometrical Drawing), which consists of the squaring in ink of a canvas painted with whi­te tempera. This preliminary gesture of any representation whatever would remain the point of “eternal recurrence” in the universe of Paolini’s thought: a topical moment and original instant that revealed the artist to himself, represen­ting the conceptual foundation of all his future work. His first official acknowledgements came in the 1970s: from shows abroad, which placed him on the international avant-garde gallery circuit, to his first museum exhibitions.

In 1970, he took part in the Venice Biennale with Elegia (Elegy, 1969), the first work in which he used the plaster cast of a classic subject: the eye of Michelangelo’s David with a fragment of mirror applied to the pupil. One of the outstanding themes in this decade was a backward glance at his work: from literal citation of celebrated paintings, he arrived at self-citation, proposing a historicizing perspective of his oeuvre.

Works such as La visione è simmetrica? (Is Vision Symmetrical?, 1972) or Teoria delle apparenze (Theory of Appearances, 1972) alludes to the idea of the picture as a potential container of all past and future works. Another theme investigated with particular interest in this period was that of the dou­ble and the copy, which found expression above all in the group of works entitled Mimesi (Mimesis, 1975–76) consisting of two plaster casts of the same classical statue set face to face, calling into que­stion the concept of reproduction and representation itself.

Echoes of "Dada" in the conceptual art

At the end of the 1950’s some Artists around the world were attracted to a provocative form of artworks. The use of “poor” materials as the contemporary “Poor Art Movement” and the use of household objects like the contemporary “Pop Art” is mixed with a certain recovery of the expressions of the “Dada Movement” which was very outrageous during the first decades of XXth Century. This time, the artwork is no longer the expression of a talented painter or a compelling sculptor. The artwork should be the vehicle of a concept, of an idea, preferably if this idea is communicating new visions of the Universe. Many of these artworks are full of philosophy and metaphysical points of view. Let’s go backwards to the rise of “Dada”...

Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is asso­ciated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Ma­tisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolu­tionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for si­gnificant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-cen­tury and twenty-first-century art, and he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matis­se) as “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind.

Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo, better known as Piero Manzoni (1933 – 1963), was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated and directly influenced the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first “Poor Art” exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Concep­tual Art. His work eschews normal artists’ materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement to “tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values”.

His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and con­sumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic mi­racle) after World War II. Italian artists such as Manzoni had to negotiate the new economic and ma­terial order of post-war Europe through inventive artistic practices that crossed geographic, artistic, and cultural borders. Manzoni died of myocardial heartache in his studio in Milan on February 6, 1963. His contemporary Ben Vautier signed Manzoni’s death certificate, declaring it a work of art.

Joseph Heinrich Beuys

Joseph Heinrich Beuys (1921–1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art the­orist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He is a founder of the provocative art movement known as Fluxus and was a key figure in the development of Happe­nings.

Beuys is known for his “extended definition of art,” in whi­ch the ideas of social sculpture could potentially reshape so­ciety and politics. He frequently held open public debates on a wide range of subjects, including political, environmen­tal, social, and long-term cultural issues.

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his sta­tic “stabiles”, and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, “Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn’t be broadcast to other people.”

Calder's artworks are sometimes funny and playful. His mee­ting with the Abstract Artist Juan Miró was very impressive for him. When Calder appreciated Miró’s painting based on the elemental colors, he manifested the intention to spread those colors in the space like free birds. That was what he really did through his kinetic sculp­tures.

After the modern architecture

Name of a group of five American archi­tects formed in the late 1960s in New York. The intellectual affinity that united them, summarized by A. Drexler as “an alternative to political romanticism”, was due not to professional collaboration but to frequent meetings in the context of university teaching. On the occasion of the meeting and the annual exhibition of the Conference of architects for the study of the environment (New York, Museum of Modern art, 1969) some critics saw in the work of the Five Architects the “establishment of a New York school”: the exhibition catalog was published in 1972 under the title Five Architects. Together they formed the repre­sentation of the USA at the 15th Milan Triennale (1973).

Paolo Portoghesi

Paolo Portoghesi (1931) is an Italian architect, theorist, historian, and professor of architecture at the University La Sapienza in Rome. He is a former president of the architectural section of the Venice Biennale (1979–92), editor-in-chief of the journal Controspazio (1969–83), and dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano univer­sity (1968–78). Portoghesi studied architecture at the Faculty of Archi­tecture at the University of Rome, completing his studies in 1957.

He began teaching the history of criticism at the same faculty in 1961. Por­toghesi opened an architectural practice with architect-engineer Vittorio Gigliotti (born 1921) in Rome in 1964. He has specialized in teaching and researching Classical architecture, especially Baroque architecture, and in particular Borromini, but also Michelangelo. His interest in more contemporary architecture coincided largely with that of his colleague in Rome, Bruno Zevi, in championing a more organic form of modernism, evident in, for instance, the work of Victor Horta and Frank Lloyd Wright, and in Italy with neorealism and the Liberty style.

This attitude has continued throughout Portoghesi’s career and is clearly visible in his own architecture. It is also evident in his concern for the studies of nature, brought to the fore in his more recent book “Nature and Architecture” (2000).

Roberto Gabetti & Aimaro Isola

Roberto Gabetti (1925 - 2000) was an Italian architect and university professor. For fifty years, he was a teacher at the Polytechnic of Turin. Already talented at the beginning of his design activity. Together with Aimaro Oreglia d’Isola, he opened an architecture studio in Via Sacchi in Turin.

Among his first works were the Stock Exchange (Turin) and the Bottega di Erasmo (Tu­rin, 1957-1959). He was the founder of "Neoliberty," active in a heated controver­sy that brought Italian architecture and its alleged departure from the Modern Movement to international attention. The activity of Studio Gabetti e Isola continued inten­sively in the following decades with particular attention to te­chnological experimentation and with indifference to the ideological and figurative preju­dices characteristic of an entire generation. Aimaro Oreglia d’Isola, better known as Aimaro Isola (1928), is an Italian architect. After graduating in archi­tecture from the Polytechnic of Turin (1952), he taught at the university in Turin. In 1950, he created a studio with Roberto Gabetti.

In the late 1950s, they counted among the major exponents of the neoliberal movement. Among their works, created mainly in the area of Piedmont (although worldwide recognized!), are the Paravia House (Piazza Statuto, Turin), the Stock Exchange (also in Turin, with Gabetti), the Justice Palace in Alba, residential complexes, urban projects, and artistic refurbishments; they also dealt with religious architecture, with particular research concepts. After Roberto Gabetti died in 2000, Aimaro Isola continued his work as a desi­gner by founding the Isolarchitetti studio with his son Saverio.

Mario Botta

Mario Botta (1943) is a Swiss architect. Botta designed his first building, a two-family house at Morbio Superiore in Ticino, at age 16. He gradua­ted from the Università Iuav di Venezia (1969). While the arrangements of spaces in this structure are inconsistent, its relationship to its site, sepa­ration of living from service spaces, and deep window recesses echo what would become his stark, strong, towering style. His designs tend to include a strong sense of geometry, often being based on very simple shapes yet creating unique volumes of space. His buildings are often made of brick, yet his use of material is wide, varied, and often unique. His tra­demark style can be seen widely in Switzerland, particularly the Ticino region, and also in the Media­theque in Villeurbanne (1988), a cathedral in Évry (1995), the Church of the Holy Face in Turin (2006), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA (1994).

Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) was an Italian architect and designer who achieved international reco­gnition in four distinct areas: architectural theory, drawing and design, and product design. He was one of the leading exponents of the postmodern movement. He was the first Italian to receive the Pritzker Prize for architecture. His earliest works of the 1960s were mostly theoretical and displayed a simultaneous influence of 1920s Italian modernism (see Giuseppe Terragni), classicist influences of Viennese architect Adolf Loos, and the reflections of the painter Giorgio de Chirico.

A trip to the Soviet Union to study Stalinist architecture also left a marked impression. Rossi held that the city re­members its past (our “collective memory”) and that we use that memory through monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city. He was also a talented designer: the distinctive independence of his buil­dings is reflected in the micro-architectures of the products he created. During the 1980s, Rossi designed stainless steel cafetières and other products for Alessi, Pirelli, and others.

Charles Willard Moore

Charles Willard Moore (1925–1993) was an American architect, edu­cator, writer, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991. He is often labeled as the father of post­modernism. His work as an educator was important to a generation of American architects who read his books or studied with him at one of the several universities where he taught. Moore preferred bold, color­ful design elements, including striking color combinations, supergraphi­cs, stylistic eclecticism, and the use of non-traditional materials such as plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs. His work often provokes arousal, challenges norms, and can lean toward kitsch. He never hid his love for roadside vernacular buildings in places like San Mi­guel Allende, the Sunset Strip, and Main Street in Disneyland.