Curated by Germano Celant

Spread across five cities and numerous institutions (including MAMbo, Bologna; the Triennale di Milano; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin), this Italy-wide look back at Arte Povera reunites its founding theorist, Germano Celant, with the group of artists—from Anselmo to Zorio—who particpated in what the curator dubbed a movement in 1967. Spanning the decades from that date to the present, Celant’s ambitious survey aims to merge the monographic with the thematic, the historical, and the contemporary. When Arte Povera emerged, it chimed enthusiastically with the sociopolitical unrest of the times; in the mid-1980s, when Celant resurrected it through a series of shows, it served as a riposte to the market-driven excesses of Transavanguardia. What might Arte Povera, the most important Italian movement since Futurism and one of the most influential postwar tendencies anywhere, mean to us today, seen all at once, reframed? That is a question to which we can expect some interesting answers.

— Nicholas Cullinan