In his eyes, arte povera has “300 million years”and not sixty… Most art historians identify this artistic avant-garde in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s? Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev sees wider, further: she demonstrates this in the vast retrospective of the movement that she orchestrates at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. Pistoletto, Penone, Zorio, Anselmo, Pascali… it is the life and work of the thirteen major artists of the movement that she traces here. And a bit of his own. Because, from them, she learned everything. “Arte povera is my whole professional life”recalls the eminent specialist.
For more than twenty years, she directed the Castello di Rivoli, whose collection houses many masterpieces of post-war Italy. She had barely left the institution near Turin when she embarked on the adventure offered by the Pinault collection. “I was going to retire, she assures, when Emma Lavigne, director of the Pinault Collection, gave me this challenge. The quality of the arte povera works in this collection is so exceptional that I immediately accepted! »
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev began to be interested in this movement from the start of her career, in the 1980s: “The fashion then was trans-avant-garde, very traditional and outdated painting, not at all arte povera, she remembers. What I immediately liked about these artists was their ability to engage in non-binary, but complex thinking, like that of the Baroque. » It is in this sense that, as she claims, arte povera has always existed. “Beyond the free association of friends that we celebrate here, it is a point of view on the aesthetic and ethical issues of art, on the experience of the work. This is the supreme Franciscan povertythe “supreme poverty of Saint Francis”, done work. Masaccio painted arte povera, Caravaggio too. »
“Perpetual change”
From the Documenta that she staged in Kassel (Germany) in 2012 to the Istanbul Biennale of 2015, she has continued to apply the lessons learned from these thirteen artists, all of whom she has worked with, except Pino Pascali, died tragically in 1968. “Alighiero Boetti often told me: “There is no point in starting from scratch, in inventing anything. Everything is already there. We just have to bring the world into the world.” »
When she evokes the spirit of arte povera, she invokes in the same breath a thousand other spirits, the heroes of mythology, the artisans of the Neolithic, the pre-Socratics. In her spiraling conversation, she moves from Piero della Francesca’s quattrocento to the best ice cream shop from Italy, after having approached the abstraction of Malevich. Of arte povera, she always promises to give a definition; she circles around, digresses, elaborates. But describing this art through words hardly interests him. What she wants the visitor to feel is the experience. “The cliché is to define this movement by its use of humble materials, wood, stone, coal, etc. But we can go deeper and make it more complex. »
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