Week 8-Arte Povera

Arte Povera was an art movement that began in Italy in the 1960's.  The term translates to "poor art" or "impoverished art."  Artists from the Arte Povera movement tended to favor found objects, natural materials, and items that could have been crafted prior to the Industrial Revolution (paper, wood, cotton, rocks, rope etc.).    The goal was to reject the mediums typically valued by the commercial art world, and instead emphasize the beauty that can be found in every day objects.  It opposed modernism, using unprocessed natural materials juxtaposed with contemporary technology.

Supposedly it is different from Assemblage (covered earlier), though I'm not entirely sure how.

An artist synonymous with Arte Povera is Michelangelo Pistoletto.  Pistoletto took impoverished materials and either used them to create striking works of "refined" original art (Wikipedia: "an exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric"), or, arranged them with work more closely matching the classical definition of "art" in an attempt to question the value of art vs. commonplace items.  A well known example of the latter being "Venus of the Rags" which juxtaposes a classical Roman statue with a pile of...well, rags, resulting in a sculpture that resembles DaVinci's laundry room: