The Estorick Collection in North London, a gallery dedicated to modern Italian art, is the ideal location for this exhibition of Arte Povera, meaning “poor art”. Arte Povera was a groundbreaking art movement that developed in Turin and other Italian cities in the late 1960s. While the major artists of the movement produced different kinds of work, they were united by an interest in unconventional – typically everyday – materials, evidenced in Mario Merz’s Cone (1967), made from willow, and Mario Ceroli’s Io (1968), an iron and coal sphere.
With its startling openness to a wide range of processes and materials Arte Povera became, in international terms, the most influential development in Italian art in the late twentieth century.
Fifty years after the first Arte Povera show, this exhibition looks at how it has informed the work of several British artists who graduated from art schools in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Stephen Nelson, who works with salvaged materials. It traces their different affinities with a way of working that went beyond modernism in terms of its interest in the personal and subjective, its rejection of a coherent style and its promotion of artistic freedom.
Poor Art | Arte Povera. Estorick Collection, London, till 17 December.
