The Pinault Collection Celebrates Arte Povera’s Radical Approach

Arte Povera’s groundbreaking approach was, in many ways, a product of its time: Italy was freshly post-war, undergoing reconstruction under U.S.-supported Marshall Plan efforts, which spurred rapid industrialization that threatened traditions stretching back centuries. The rural culture that had defined the country—rooted in connection to the land and artisanality (the “art of making”)—was soon replaced by a commodified consumer and industrial production culture. This shift fueled the postwar economic boom but also profoundly undermined the shared value system that anchored the culture of an already divided and remarkably diverse young nation. By the mid-1960s, Italy had transformed into a hub of large-scale industries, emerging as a manufacturing leader and exporting the excellence of “Made in Italy” on a global scale.

The movement of Arte Povera emerged in response to these sweeping changes, with a “guerrilla” manifesto championed by curator and critic Germano Celant. His vision united a heterogeneous group of artists bound by a shared “Italianicity”—a return to artisanal forms of creation that emphasized practices using only basic, inexpensive materials sourced from their surroundings and engaged with natural, physical and chemical processes. Driven by a militantly anti-capitalist stance, Arte Povera stood against America-inspired consumerism and the burgeoning market dynamics that were transforming contemporary art into commodities.

A major survey recently unveiled at the Bourse de commerce – Pinault Collection during Art Basel Paris celebrates this movement in all its variety, diversity and inventiveness, underscoring how its philosophical approaches and values might hold profound relevance today. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev—an internationally recognized authority on Arte Povera and director of Castello di Rivoli—this significant exhibition examines how these artists explored the intersection of culture, nature and artificiality, positioning Arte Povera as a potential model for a much-needed shift to a more sustainable relationship with natural resources. “In an era where everything is abstracted, and the technology through which we experience the world is opaque to most people, there is a need to go back to basics and affirm why matter matters and why embodied life and materials matter,” Christov-Bakargiev commented in a statement.

Arte Povera was all about materials and energy. Rooted in a uniquely Italian “artisanality,” its approach has parallels to the Latino “raquachismo,” with both characterized by a survivalist attitude, inventiveness and the art of making the most of the least. This concept lends a sense of tension between the sobriety of materials in many installations displayed in the rotunda and the architectural grandeur of the space itself. Here, the exhibition gathers a dynamic nucleo of seminal works by each of the thirteen artists originally exhibited in 1967 by Germano Celant. Mario Merz’s igloo made of fragile glass fragments stands alongside Giuseppe Penone’s first sculpted tree and Pino Pascali’s machine gun, which faces Luciano Fabro’s masterpiece Lo Spirito (1968-1973) across the space. Nearby, an unexpected, parodic bronze fountain, Boetti’s Autoritratto (Mi Fuma Il Cervello) (1993-1994), stands solemnly, evoking the traditional sculptures one might expect in such a classic setting, alongside Giulio Paolini’s two replicas of Venus. Over these works, an installation by Gilberto Zorio reveals the passage of energy, with an alchemical interplay of industrial materials and leather that transforms the sculpture into a vehicle of chemical processes. Collectively, these seminal works create a system of tension that animated the movement, demonstrating the rich diversity of their practices.

What united the artists of Arte Povera, however, was their quest for a form of art that felt “authentic.” They chose humble materials and simple techniques often used by craftspeople and laborers, ranging from the most refined craftsmanship to the most basic, in celebration of the local knowledge embedded in their land. While the notion of craft was central to their work, interpreted in many ways, Arte Povera explored a new tension between techné and nature—one that neither ancient nor rural culture knew, but that was born out of modern industrialization and urbanism.

Pier Paolo Calzolari’s Senza titolo (Materassi) (1970) exemplifies the intentional “impoverishment” characteristic of Arte Povera’s approach. This series of six mattresses, covered with refrigeration tubes and displayed in the Salon near the entrance, serves as one of the first encounters in the exhibition. Through this piece, Calzolari highlights the energetic processes that traverse and mutate the materials, revealing the atomic energies that animate even the most ordinary objects in daily life, driven by the ceaseless dynamic movement of particles at the core of material existence. Hanging nearby, a set of photographs provides viewers with an immediate sense of Arte Povera’s experimental and, at times, histrionic character during the 1960s and 1970s.

As the exhibition unfolds, each room—both on the ground floor and upstairs—offers an ideal setting and pacing to immerse visitors in the artists’ richly diverse yet densely layered practices and narratives. The journey begins on the ground floor with the pioneering and intriguingly archaic aesthetics of Jannis Kounellis, Maria Merz and Mario Merz. Exploring a more organic or poetic continuity between industry and nature, they create multilayered allegories that evoke phenomenological, intimate and collective realities as perpetually transforming states. Jannis Kounellis’ seminal work, exhibited during the 1967 collective exhibition “Fuoco Immagine Acqua Terra” at Attico Gallery in Rome, captures the transition of Italian art toward realism and metamorphosis. The pistil of a metal flower here is made of a gas valve that, when ignited, produces a blue flame—an evocative visual metaphor for humanity’s primordial moments and a powerful symbol of life and energy.

Domesticity and the liveliness of materials are at the heart of Marisa Merz’s work, such as her delicate heads on display. Her pieces are infused with a distinctively feminine awareness of the flow of personal and historical time, revealed through everyday life. Merz made no distinction between her art and her life, nor between her roles as artist, mother and wife. Her works, subtle tactile fragments, emerge from a porous, inter-relational space. As “phenomena in space,” her sculptures and drawings inhabit both ethereal and ancestral realms, transcending time and inviting a more poetic, spiritual dimension of reality. Meanwhile, her partner Mario Merz explored the cosmos’s secret laws, striving to capture timeless “universal” structures and codes, such as the Fibonacci sequence, which allowed him to attempt, in some sense, to contain the universe’s expansive energies within a rational framework. Other works by Merz lean into political themes, addressing the turbulence of the era in Italy and beyond. His Igloo di Giap (1968), for instance, features a neon inscription quoting North Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp: “If the enemy concentrates, he loses ground; if he disperses, he loses strength.”

Continuing in the galleries upstairs, the exhibition invites visitors on a rich, diverse journey through the practices of other Arte Povera members and the evolution of their work over time. For example, one gallery explores Michelangelo Pistoletto’s philosophical and aesthetic journey, from his pop-inspired beginnings to a conceptual shift with the humble “Minus Objects” made of corrugated cardboard, and finally back to a more viewer- and Instagram-friendly aesthetic with his renowned “Quadri Specchianti” (Mirror Paintings). In recent years, his work, along with that of other histrionic and contemplative artists, has taken on a more spiritual dimension with his utopian “Terzo Paradiso.”

The exhibition also allows us to appreciate the various phases of Alighiero Boetti’s practice, unified by his vision of art as a participatory activity, a game balancing order and disorder. Engaging with words and symbols, Boetti questioned the experience of life and society’s relationships. Beginning with the simplicity and ephemerality of one of his first works—paper-doll sculptures, which may represent Arte Povera’s most Franciscan ideals—Boetti’s practice transformed entirely after his time in Kabul, culminating in his famous “Mappe.” Whether created by his own hand or with the communities he empowered, Boetti’s works on view illustrate his artisanal approach to material, embodying the belief that the creative act belongs to everyone, as a way to express presence and identity in the world.

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In the spaces that follow, some artists turn directly back to nature and primary elements, such as Giuseppe Penone’s trees and compositions of spines. His sculpture Idee di pietra—1532 kg di luce (“Ideas of stone – 1532 kg of light”) (2010), installed in front of the building, offers an immediate statement of Arte Povera’s core principle: the fusion of nature and culture. Similarly exploring the balance between fusion and tension, Giovanni Anselmo examined gravity and spatial/weight relationships, often creating works from living materials, such as his iconic Untitled (Sculpture That Eats), which presses a piece of lettuce between a large granite block and a smaller stone, held in place by a wire. If the lettuce dries out, the wire loses tension, and the stone falls, symbolizing the fragile equilibrium of all things under the cosmic order.

The final upstairs gallery leads us from Pino Pascali’s playful sculptures, where nature is often reconstructed with industrial materials, to Giulio Paolini’s conceptual practice. Paolini strives for an “ideal” or utopian dimension, engaging in dialogue with classical traditions. Meanwhile, Luciano Fabro expands and redefines the boundaries of sculpture, rigorously exploring spatial context, material and meaning, drawing on the epiphanies of historical memory and tradition.

And Gilberto Zorio’s alchemical installations explore the transformation of energies in natural phenomena and their effects on materials through physical and chemical alterations. Investigating natural forces and the continuously changing nature of their dynamics and of every material, Zorio’s work proves how new forms can be created from dynamic processes of energetic entropy in nature and human life.

What makes this exhibition especially memorable and insightful are the thoughtful historical dialogues and juxtapositions staged in the “Passage” display cases and galleries. These showcase exchanges between the movement’s members and both their “precursors” and “successors,” who have influenced Arte Povera philosophically and empirically or continue to work today at the intersections of art, nature and techne. This approach emphasizes the infinite forms of matter, energy flows and a phenomenological reduction of lived experience. The “Passages” cases around the Rotunda alternate works by contemporary artists who emerged in the 2000s, like Otobong Nkanga and Theaster Gates, alongside historical figures such as Lucio Fontana, David Hammons and Piero Manzoni, among others. Ultimately, by expanding history and transforming the entire Bourse de commerce into an open stage where these artists’ ideas circulate freely across geographies and time, Arte Povera’s message remains powerfully relevant in today’s world.

“Arte Povera” is on view through January 20 at Bourse de commerce – Pinault Collection.