Arte Povera

Arte Povera, poor art, was an Italian movement named by critic Germano Celant in a 1967 essay and exhibition in Genoa, uniting artists including Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz who rejected industrial materials and traditional fine-art media in favor of humble, everyday and organic substances, earth, rags, twigs, coal, live animals and plants, treated as bearers of their own inherent physical and symbolic energy. Kounellis's 1969 installation of twelve live horses tethered inside a Rome gallery and Pistoletto's mirror paintings, which incorporated the viewer's own reflected presence into the work, exemplify the movement's insistence on real, unprocessed material and lived experience over the polished commodity object. Emerging alongside Conceptual Art and Minimalism but distinct in its embrace of organic impermanence and Mediterranean cultural memory rather than industrial repetition, Arte Povera's influence on subsequent installation and process-based art has been widely acknowledged by later curators and historians.