Entrare nell’opera

Artist conversation with Michelangelo Pistoletto 
and Nike Bätzner
September 1, 2019, 11am

The artist Michelangelo Pistoletto is part of the exhibition Entrare nell’opera. Processes and Performative Attitudes in Arte Povera and is coming to Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein for an artist conversation on the closing day of the show.

The Italian painter, action and multimedia artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (* 1933) was a driving force of the arte povera movement in the 1960s. Key to the development of his own work is “collaborazione creativa,” creative collaboration with a wide range of protagonists, and the “Progetto Arte,” reflection on the social role of art. Intended to serve as a venue for discussing such topics, he founded the “Università delle Idee” in the northern Italian town of Biella in 1996.

The artist conversation with Nike Bätzner begins with Pistoletto’s current projects around the world which marry questions of art and society and goes on to look back on central aspects of his work since the 1960s. A fundamental question in this context is: What is his vision for living together today?

Co-curator Nike Bätzner, who wrote her doctoral thesis on arte povera (published as: Arte Povera. Zwischen Erinnerung und Ereignis, Nuremberg 2000), has been a professor of art history at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle since 2008. She has published on various aspects of contemporary art, including: Assoziationsraum Wunderkammer. Zeitgenössische Künste zur Kunst- und Naturalienkammer der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle 2015; Die Aktualität des Barock (ed.), Zürich/Berlin 2014; Blickmaschinen. Oder wie Bilder entstehen (ed. with Werner Nekes and Eva Schmidt, cat. Siegen, Budapest, Seville), Cologne 2008; Faites vos jeux! Kunst und Spiel seit Dada (ed., cat. Vaduz, Berlin, Siegen), Ostfildern Ruit 2005.

In cooperation with Liechtensteinische Kunstgesellschaft.

The exhibition Entrare nell’opera. Processes and Performative Attitudes in Arte Povera is on show until the 1st of September.

Entrare nell’opera
Processes and Performative Attitudes in Arte Povera
June 7—September 1, 2019

In an extensive exhibition, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein examines hitherto little researched aspects of Arte Povera. In addition to legendary artworks of the main protagonists of this movement, the show also features a number of hardly known photographic and film documents. They spotlight the processual, performative and theatrical actions that defined the work of the Arte Povera artists from 1959 to 1979.

In the 1960s and 70s both society and art underwent dynamic changes. In Italy, the link between art, culture and radical-reforming efforts was particularly strong. The Arte Povera movement gave rise to artistic approaches that poeticised everyday life and honed people’s sense of time in an attempt to unite ephemeral action and material objects.

The actions of the Arte Povera artists eclectically interwove elements of process, performance and theatre. Live animals, such as horses or a white peacock, appeared in exhibition situations, embedded in narrative processes. A horse rider wearing a mask of Apollo sat motionless on his steed in a gallery; a man raced through gallery spaces on roller-skates, watched by an albino dog; an actor recited Flaubert in a mirrored cube; gigantic trumpets sounded out for justice; large parasols rotated in a cosmic constellation. Streets and forests, palaces and garages became venues, as did the sky, explored in a Cessna 175.

The exhibition Entrare nell’opera [Entering the Work] illustrates the diversity of the art and cognitive processes involved, allowing visitors to be a part of this living sphere of action. It draws on in-depth research on Arte Povera, that forms a main theme in the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein collection.

The exhibition, conceived in close collaboration with the artists or their estates, is a production of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in cooperation with MAMC+ / Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne, France, and will be on view there from November 30, 2019 on. Curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll with Nike Bätzner, Maddalena Disch and Valentina Pero.

The show is accompanied by a publication that presents the first comprehensive account of the actions of Arte Povera.

Artists in the exhibition:
Giovanni Anselmo (*1934), Alighiero e Boetti (1940–1994), Pier Paolo Calzolari (*1943), Luciano Fabro (1936–2007), Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), Eliseo Mattiacci (*1940), Mario Merz (1925–2003), Marisa Merz (*1926), Giulio Paolini (*1940), Pino Pascali (1935–1968), Giuseppe Penone (*1947), Michelangelo Pistoletto (*1933), Emilio Prini (1943–2016) and Gilberto Zorio (*1944).