Ars Povera by Germano Celant

Arte Povera (literally ‘poor art’) is the term first used by the critic Germano Cerlant to describe a radical art movement historically centred in Italy during the 1960s and 70s.

This book includes the Italian artists first grouped together under the collective identity traced by Celant, as well as artists belonging to minimalist, post-minimalist and land art movements whose methods and approaches resonated with those more closely associated with arte povera.

Characterised by a departure from the costly and more durable materials of more traditional art forms - such as oil paint, bronze, or marble - arte povera focuses instead on readily available materials, those which could be found and used regardless of societal limitations: earth, twigs, scraps of wire and fabric, wild flowers and grasses that would outgrow an artist’s line drawn across a meadow, living horses and melting ice.

It sought to reform the ways in which art could be made, exhibited and theorised - vibrant, emergent things rather than objects already contained. Rather than a heavy-handed transubstantiation, the materiality and animacy of the subject is preserved and enhanced through a reciprocal tactility. Flesh remains flesh, bread bread, and dirt dirt. The transformations witnessed in arte povera are intrinsic to the unstable materials from which they are made (ice, animals, grass, wax) and the human ideas they bear.

With works and texts by Celant, Eva Hesse, Walter De Maria, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Stephan Kaltenbach, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Beuys, Michael Helzer, Ger van Elk, Lawrence Weiner, Luciano Fabro, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbetts, Robert Barry, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Dennis Oppenheim, Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson, Alighiero Boetti, Hans Haacke, Gilberto Zorio, Robert Morris, Marinus Boezem, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, etc.

An amazing book!

German edition (texts in English and German). First edition, very good condition. Softcover. 240 pages fully illustrated with black and white photographs. 1969.