Arte Povera - Gallery 2

Merz’s creative exploration of the industrial, the domestic, and the feminine dates to the mid-1960s. On the surface of this untitled work, the artist tacked a number of her signature knitted copper grids, known as quadratini (little squares).

By manipulating copper wire with patient handiwork, Merz created three-dimensional drawings in space, moving beyond the pictorial field into our own environment. Moreover, by using an industrial material for the artisanal practice of knitting, often associated with feminine handicraft, Merz deconstructed binaries between industrial and artisanal practice as well as the gendering of artistic materials and processes. Merz often reflected on what it meant to be a woman artist and a mother.

She frequently made her work in the space of the home and of motherhood (in her view), while caring for her daughter Beatrice. Her use of push pins, knitted wire, and everyday materials can be read as extensions of the domestic and artistic environment of Merz’s home.

The resulting work explores the potential recoding of gendered labor through creative practice. Merz’s work constitutes a forerunner of feminist practice in Italian art that pre-dates the Italian feminist movement of the early 1970s.

Particolare, meaning “detail,” is one of Giovanni Anselmo’s most recognizable works. Conceived in 1972 for his solo exhibition at Galleria Sperone in Turin, it exemplifies the situational conception of the work of art that defines the artist’s approach.

The piece consists of one or more projectors placed directly on the floor or pedestal. They project a slide that reads PARTICOLARE onto a specific point in the exhibition space that is most legible from about two feet away. When viewers stand between the projector and the opposite wall, the beam hits a part of their bodies—a “detail” of their own form.

The word “particolare” thus becomes a caption that describes the process triggered by the work itself. The beam of light always hits a detail, a “particolare” of the whole reality. While the mechanism of the work remains the same, the work as we experience it in reality is unique every time.

Trofeo is part of Pascali’s Finte sculture series, his “fake” or “feigned sculptures.” Drawing upon his early professional career in set design, Pascali made the works in the series by stretching white-painted canvas over skeletal structures of wood.

The sculptures included animal forms as well as plants and natural environs. The artist explains, “... what interests me is this light thickness that forms the sculpture. That’s the sculpture. It’s the make-believe.”

The title refers to hunting trophies and thus shows the artist’s often playful attitude. The references to ambiguous animal forms combined with the artificial whiteness of the surface and stylization of the wooden structure give the work of art the resemblance of a toy.

Engaging both nature and artifice, Trofeo exemplifies the ambiguity that is characteristic of Arte Povera.

Unfortunately, due to Pascali’s untimely death at the age of 32, the artist’s body of work is relatively small, making this a very special work.

In Il panorama fin verso oltremare, a block of granite is placed on the ground under a stripe of vivid ultramarine blue painted directly on the wall.

The ultramarine pigment references the mineral lapis lazuli, which was historically imported to Europe from lands “beyond the sea.” In the history of art, the pigment was reserved for the most precious areas of paintings.

The connection between the individual and the natural environment, often explored through the artist’s own body, is central to Anselmo’s work. The stripe of blue paint measures exactly 171 centimeters in height. It corresponds to the artist’s sight line when he stands on top of the granite slab, allowing him to envision “what lies beyond the sea.”

A sheet of white paper covered in transparent plexiglass is mounted on the wall. On the right side of the work, the word “TUTTO” is written in black self-adhesive lettering.

The word, meaning “everything,” traverses the paper underneath the plexiglass sheet, the plexiglass itself, and the wall of the gallery. This piece belongs to a series of works in which the letters of “TUTTO” are positioned in multiple points in space. In the artist’s words, these arrangements “draw nearer to the ‘tutto’ much more than if I had indicated it in a single point.”

The surfaces of Tutto include the paper ground or conventional space of representation, the plexiglass cover (reminding us of a frame and therefore conditions of display), and the physical structure of gallery. These surfaces act as signals of all of the possible physical conditions in which everything might be present, everywhere and at every time. Within the context of the early 1970s, the title of this work also echoed the call of the Italian workers’ movement: “Vogliamo tutto!” (We want everything!).

Marisa Merz was the only female artist associated with the Arte Povera group. She often used materials associated with transformation and energy in her practice, such as wax, clay, and copper. Creating her work in the domestic space of the home that she shared with Mario Merz, the artist developed a unique visual vocabulary supported by the seemingly infinite practice of repetition and re-elaboration of her private life.

In this untitled work, a figure appears to float in space. It holds a violin, an object that often appeared in the artist’s oeuvre. On the right side of the composition hangs a copper wire that is affixed to the surface with a humble piece of scotch tape. Perhaps with a sense of irony, the artist painted the tape gold.

Merz creates a fleeting dream-like universe that straddles traditional divisions between abstraction and representation. The remnant of a wood beam at the base of the work reminds us of nature and our connection to it, grounding the otherwise ephemeral work. The work recalls Byzantine and Renaissance sacred painting in its scale, imagery and the use of gold. In Merz’s work, the creative act is positioned as a perpetually changing process, in which icons, existence, and dreams coalesce.

The intersection of diagonal and vertical lines forms a solid geometric shape at the center of the composition of this untitled work. The figure has a supernatural presence. Marisa Merz made her first forays into drawing in the 1980s.

In these works, the figures, often angelic in quality, appear to be in the process of appearing and faces throughout her career suggests an enduring focus on humanity in the artist’s work.

Merz expanded the daily ritual of her gestures and movements through drawing. The arabesques, gridded lines, and marks define a figure caught in the process connects her art to the familiar and intimate spaces of everyday life.

In the mid-1970s, Marisa Merz began creating the Testine (Little Heads) in raw clay; the heads are simply modeled and slightly informal in appearance. Swellings or folds around the eyes, mouth, and nose retain the traces of the artist’s fingers and sculptural process.

The forms and images of Marisa Merz’s work frequently exemplify an intimate subjectivity. Her work is often light and evanescent but always rich in tactile and organic qualities.

In this work, the plastic eyes seem to brim with tears. The use of a high and thin pedestal situates the sculpture in space and defines its orientation. The gaze of the testina evades a frontal encounter, creating a quiet atmosphere of concentration.

The use of a table as a pedestal registers the work as a domestic object. It recalls Merz’s tendency to arrange the heads on tables in her home, where she often made her work in the kitchen and living room.

At the end of the 1960s, Luciano Fabro created a series of works known as Piedi (Feet). Fabro often used precious materials in contrast to the common misinterpretation of Arte Povera as a literal use of “poor,” inexpensive, or otherwise impoverished materials.

The artist often added a twist of irony to his work; in this case, the surreal sculpture resembles the claw of a gigantic, mythological bird.

Half sculpture, half architectural element, Marmo colaticcio e seta naturale (Piede) subverts both. Instead of being a solid structure that supports the weight of the ceiling, it is composed of two distinct elements: the marble foot placed on the floor and the hollow cylinder of silk material, the silk stocking contrasts with the heavy foot. The lightness of the silk lends the sculpture a sense of potential movement and vitality. In the artist’s view, Piede as a skeleton covered with material.