ART-PRESENTATION:Un Art Pauvre
With “Un art pauvre” a completely new, multidisciplinary exhibition, the Centre George Pompidou proposes an analysis of artistic practices linked with the idea of “plainness” in creation from the ‘60ss onwards, not only in the visual arts, with the prominent Arte Povera Movement, but also in the field of music, design, architecture, theatre, performance and experimental cinema.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Centre Georges Pompidou Archive
Sensitive to traces, reliefs and the most elementary manifestations of life, the artists of the Arte Povera Movement, and more largely of “plain art”, drew on every kind of archaic gesture. They all frequently used natural and waste materials. Arte Povera came about through emulation, its birth was announced in two manifestos in 1967, one by the critic Germano Celant, who invented the expression, the other by the artist Alighiero Boetti with his “Manifesto” poster, which featured a list of sixteen names, some well-known, some forgotten, and some whose presence seems distinctly surprising. The exhibition in Galerie 4 starts and ends with three figures of Italian post-war art: Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri. It reveals all Arte Povera’s diversity through 40 works by the movement’s leading representatives and other artists who are not as well-known for being its pioneers: Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Mario Ceroli, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. The exhibition focuses on the decade 1964-74. As well a few later exceptions, the spotlight is also on 1960, a significant year bringing Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Mario Merz together by way of an introduction, before moving on to the major preoccupations of Arte Povera, which include tautology, writing, the spoken word, vital energy, animality and shelter. Historic printed and photographic documents are presented in showcases, shedding further light on the context and relationship between works and artists. In resonance with the exhibition “Un art pauvre”, two sessions based on Arte Povera and its principal figures are being presented. Based on artists’ films and exhibitions archives, help the visitors appreciate the close relationship between this Art Movement and the art of the cinema, and grasp the simultaneously complementary and contradictory relationship between works and their documentation. In addition, at the end of the Galerie 4 circuit, there is a screening of two films shot by Thierry De Mey and Raphaël Zarka on the site of Gibellina in Sicily, reconfigured as a huge landscape artwork by Alberto Burri. In the Centre Pompidou Collections on level 5 of the Museum, Architecture and Design are featured with installations, films, photos, models and objects devised around the Global Tools Movement founded in 1973.
Info: Centre Georges Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, Duration: 8/6-29/8/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-22:00, Thu 11:00-23:00, www.centrepompidou.fr
