“Una visione globale”: Arte Povera’s Worlds

As part of its spring season, Magazzino Italian Art Foundation presents “Una visione globale”: Arte Povera’s Worlds, a four-part lecture series exploring new insights into Arte Povera. The series embodies Magazzino’s enduring commitment to creating new opportunities for scholarly research and critical assessment of Italian Postwar and Contemporary Art. Organized by 2019-20 Scholar-in-Residence Tenley Bick, the series convenes leading scholars and curators in the field to explore the work of Arte Povera artists, its critical reception, and relevance to contemporary art—both in Italy and the United States.

Drawing its title from the texts of Germano Celant—the founder of Arte Povera—the series addresses Arte Povera’s engagement with internationalism and models of globalism, including trans-geographical and cultural politics, explorations of Marxism and socialist humanism, and the movement’s frequent natural, planetary, and cartographic references.

Each lecture will last approximately 45 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session. 

Tickets can be reserved free-of-charge on Eventbrite here.

Details on each program and lecturer follow below:

Victoria Surliuga – Ezio Gribaudo and Arte Povera: Parallel Tracks from Turin to the World (1966–1972) 
March 21, 3–5pm

Victoria Surliuga, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, Italian Program Coordinator, and World Cinema Coordinator at Texas Tech University, explores the life and work of Turin-based artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo, winner of the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. A contemporary of Germano Celant, Gribaudo worked closely with many key figures of modern art from around the world, including Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, Joan Miró, and Francis Bacon, among others. Mirroring Celant’s endeavor to turn Arte Povera into an artistic trend with a global impact, Gribaudo had a keen interest in expanding the international scope of his artistic and editorial work. Belonging neither to Arte Povera nor any school, Gribaudo’s work is nonetheless essential to a more thorough understanding of contemporary Italian art.

Valérie Da Costa – Pino Pascali: Between Arte Povera and the Mediterranean
April 4, 3–5pm

Valérie Da Costa, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the University of Strasbourg, addresses the concept of “the Mediterranean” in the practice of Italian artist Pino Pascali. Pascali’s work across a range of materials—including water, mud, fake fur, and steel wood—led to a reconceptualization of sculpture as a medium, as well as the exhibition as a space. Focused on the artist’s sculptural turn to the Mediterranean in 1967 and 1968, this lecture offers a re-reading of Pino Pascali’s work based on anthropology and critical texts of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ernesto de Martino, and Pier Paolo Pasolini within the historical context of the beginning of Arte Povera. Da Costa’s research focuses on Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century.

Tenley Bick – Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Comizi (1965–1966): Pop, Protest, and Politics in Early Arte Povera
April 18, 3–5pm

Tenley Bick, 2019-20 Scholar-in-Residence at Magazzino Italian Art and Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art at Florida State University, examines Michelangelo Pistoletto’s quadri specchianti (mirror paintings) through investigation of his understudied Comizi (Rallies) series, inspired by the political climate and tumultuous context of mid-1960s Italy. By shedding light on the Comizi and related works’ navigation of Italian labor politics, American Pop, and the cultural geopolitics of the transatlantic context of the early Cold War, this lecture reintroduces the Comizi as the birthplace of and proposes a new model of political figuration in the 1960s, repositioning understanding of the mirror paintings and the history of postwar Italian and European art.

Chris Bennett – Salt and Copper: Stratified Questions and Replies from an Interview with Jannis Kounellis
May 2, 3–5pm

Chris Bennett, Assistant Professor of Art History/Contemporary Art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, explores Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis’ production through a transnational lens. Based on an interview with the artist conducted in New York City in 2013, the lecture focuses on four insights generated by the discussion, ranging from Kounellis’ self-described “discovery” of an ongoing global “logic” for his work, to his global and conceptual enactment of artwork as perpetually “unfinished.” Drawing on Kounellis’ frequent allusion to themes of migration and transit in his work, Bennett offers new insights to the broader history of Arte Povera through close examinations of specific works and sets out to connect Arte Povera’s very founding, as a configuration, to the broader terrain of international contemporary artistic practice.