ART-TRIBUTE: Contingencies-Arte Povera and After
Precisely 50 years after the exhibition “Arte Povera-IM Spazio” (27/9-20/10/1967) at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, several key tendencies of Arte Povera remain strikingly relevant. This is especially so among a generation of young artists, who, like the original practitioners of Arte Povera, exist in a climate of sociopolitical turmoil rife with pressure towards polish and productivity.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery Archive
For the semi-centennial of the Arte Povera Movement, the exhibition “Contingencies: Arte PoVera and After”, is placing works by contemporary artists in dialogue with, crossing significant Arte Povera works from the ‘60s and ‘70s these historical moments in order to better understand the echoes between them. The exhibition is the latest in Luxembourg & Dayan’s ongoing program devoted to the relationship between postwar Italian art and contemporary culture. The exhibition features historical works by: Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. These are placed in conversation with contemporary works by: Olga Balema, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Nina Canell, Jason Loebs, and Carlos Reyes. Arte Povera artists questioned the established languages of government, industry, and culture by proclaiming the porosity of the artwork, and exalting in its contingency: suddenly, a potential chemical reaction or simple transfer of energy could comprise the work itself. The exhibition considers the ways in which artists today similarly react to a world in turmoil by rejecting the autonomy of the art object in order to harness, engage, or interrupt systemic flows, whether those are organic, social, or technological, on a distinctly material level. If Arte Povera emerged as a critique of modernity’s push for postwar, the work of these contemporary artists similarly bristles against the smooth, seemingly immaterial dissemination of capital, information, and images within our present global order. This is an embodied and thus occasionally messy critique that is launched, like that of the original Arte Povera artists, on a material register. As with Arte Povera, these works enact tensions between continuity and disjuncture, between interconnectivity on the one hand and the inevitability of energy lost and connections missed on the other. And though the materials employed are not always “poor”, they are certainly self-effacing, often breaking down, or verging on something else.
Info: Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, 64 East 77th Street, New York, Duration: 23/10-16/12/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, www.luxembourgdayan.com
