Creative breakthrough. International meta-subject Olympiad of scientific creativity “Breakthrough. Critical Points of Fate

Italian “poor art” is being shown in the halls of the Winter Palace until August 16, 2018. The movement that emerged at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s managed to radically update the aesthetic ideas and artistic practice of that time. Pavel Gerasimenko talks about how in 50 years arte povera turned into one of the brands of Italy of the twentieth century and was able to become on par with the jewelry of the Hermitage.

Lucio Fontana. Spatial concept: waiting. 1964. Canvas, water-based paint. Gallery of Contemporary Art GAM, Turin. Courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei. Photo: © Studio fotografico Gonella

The exhibition, entitled “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough,” celebrates the anniversary of the artistic movement that arose at the turn of 1967 and 1968. For the first time, the Hermitage is showing “poor art,” which over the course of 50 years has become one of the artistic brands of 20th-century Italy. Most of the exhibits come from the richest collection of arte povera in the Rivoli Castle near Turin. They occupied the halls on the third floor of the Winter Palace - both enfilades, the outer room, previously dedicated to German painting of the 19th century, and the front room, where the impressionists and post-impressionists had recently been housed. Only a few years have passed since the Hermitage part of the Shchukin and Morozov collections moved to the General Staff Building, but not everyone can remember where specific works hung. The curators of the exhibition - Dmitry Ozerkov and Anastasia Chaladze from the Hermitage and the renowned Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the Castello di Rivoli collection - of course, did not have in mind a correspondence between the previous and current filling of the halls. But still, the memory of the place is bizarrely preserved in the museum: by historical standards, quite recently, viewers of Picasso’s cubist works were indignant, “Is this art?” - now the same will happen in front of the objects of Jannis Kounellis or Mario Merz. Dmitry Ozerkov’s article in the catalog notes the similarity of the space in the Hermitage with the Berne Kunsthalle, where the world recognition of arte povera took place at Harald Szeemann’s exhibition “When Relationships Become Form” in 1969. Perhaps, in the 70s of the last century, not only the exhibition architecture of the classical museum located in the palace remained, but also domestic concepts about the history of art. Meanwhile, in the twentieth century, Italian and Russian life had much in common: only in a poor and predominantly agricultural country are they able to poeticize machine and technology to such an extent as the Italian and Russian futurists did. In Povera art, as in Russian futurism, the pochvennichesk principle is clearly visible. Its powerful influence on world art over the last 50 years continues to grow - thus, following the Italian example, “Russian Poor” was successfully conceptualized, which is confirmed by auction prices for artists of “poor art.”

Fragment of the exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative breakthrough" with the work of Mario Merz "Igloo with a tree" (1968-1969). Photo: Pavel Gerasimenko

Arte povera became known thanks to the critic and curator Germano Celant. At the end of 1967, a group exhibition took place at the Genoese gallery La Bertesca, marking the beginning of a new artistic movement. The art of arte povera originated in the north of the country - the rough and poor, “non-artistic” materials that the artists used were directly related to the local history and landscape and corresponded to the peasant austerity of the way of life of these places. The new art was a reaction to the fashionable ideology and artistic practice of pop art. Celant was able to give it an international significance in the article “Arte Povera: Notes on Guerrilla Warfare,” published the same year.

In more than twenty halls of the Hermitage, only 16 artists are represented. The exhibition, in addition to the monographic division of authors into halls, does not have a clear structure, so it is worth dwelling on both the most spectacular works and their opposite - fundamentally unspectacular works. However, both of them will confuse the domestic viewer. The curators relied on the minimalism of the exhibition: no more than three or four items are displayed in each room, and thanks to the distance between them, small rooms with low ceilings become visually more spacious.

The exhibition opens with “Hate” by Gilberto Zorio, which looks like a metal bar suspended about a meter from the floor on ropes. In 1969, the artist hammered a rope into a piece of lead, forming the word “odio”, that is, hatred, from its bends. The material weight and roughness of this object immediately establishes the main images of the entire exhibition.

Gilberto Zorio. Hatred. 1969. Lead, rope.
Private collection, Turin. Photo: Antonio Maniscalco

The predecessors of arte povera - Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni - are shown in the first rooms. If the works of Burri and Fontana ended the exhibition of Italian art “Futurism. Novecento. Abstraction" in the Hermitage in 2005, then Manzoni is presented in the museum for the first time, and not by the famous Merda d'Artista, but by one of the "Akhroms" - canvases with a surface impregnated with white clay. Both Fontana and Manzoni were sculptors by training, so an introductory the piece sets another of the conceptual components of the entire exhibition - sculpturality as an important quality of arte povera. Another important property - the processuality of this art - is shown in "Untitled (homage to Fontane)" by Pier Paolo Calzolari. In this work of 1989, as in other things by Calzolari , the expressive means is the frost produced on the surface of the lead by the cooling elements, so such a work changes all the time.

The next concept, unrealizability, which Germano Celant called one of the features of the new movement, is answered by the “International” in the work of Gilberto Zorio. The melody of the proletarian anthem, played by the artist on the carillon in 1975 as part of a performance and repeated for recording in 2015, sounds in the passage under the arches of the Alexander Hall of the Winter Palace. This audio installation combines the ephemerality of sound with revolutionary utopia. In the adjacent room, four works by Dzorio are displayed, including the 1967 installation “Pink - Blue - Pink”, which now looks like a harbinger of science art. In it, cobalt chloride, depending on air humidity, changes color from pink to blue. Comparing Dzorio to a modern alchemist, Christov-Bakargiev writes: “The chemical reactions in materials are analogous to the chemical and energetic processes in the brain, and therefore the results of psychic work in general.”

Fragment of the exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative breakthrough" with works by Gilberto Zorio. Photo: State Hermitage Museum

The Italian curator dedicated the entire exhibition to the memory of Jannis Kounellis. The two halls devoted to the works of the artist who died in 2017, of course, cannot be compared in scale with the installations made by the classic arte povera in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, or with the opera productions shown in Perm with his scenography, but still give an idea of the methods of work . The exhibition includes an early painting - "Z-3" from 1961, and objects that demonstrate the beauty and properties of materials in their original materiality - these are two works from the late 1960s "Untitled", one with coal, the other with wool. A separate room is occupied by a 1997 installation of black coats suspended in a row from a rust-covered rail - its emotional effect also arises from the juxtaposition of textures and the difference in materials.

Giuseppe Penone, with his works, occupies a room from the windows of which one can see his sculpture from the large cycle “Ideas from Stone” entitled “1372 kg of light”, installed in the large courtyard of the Hermitage a month before the start of the exhibition. Penone's works now function well as public art or in interiors, as evidenced by the installation "The Box", completed in 2007. The tree bark is covered with leather, and the bronze casting of the trunk is gilded from the inside. The things of Alighiero Boetti have the same decorative effect. Over the years, the art of arte povera has evolved into a set of formal techniques. Many artists both replicated their plastic finds in individual works and repeated works in several copies, although the collection of the Castello di Rivoli contains the primary or most significant versions.

Giuseppe Penone. Ideas made of stone - 1372 kg of light. 2018.
Photo: State Hermitage Museum

Some works were created by artists as fundamentally finite - such as Giovanni Anselmo's Neon in Cement, in which a neon tube must be replaced with a new one when it stops emitting light. “Floor (Tautology)” by Luciano Fabro is a square of floor covered with newspapers. Traditionally, in Italy this was done with a freshly washed floor, but the domestic viewer will first of all notice the fresh Russian press on the parquet. His “Coat Hangers (From Naples)” of 1976-1977 builds a bridge from arte povera to another post-minimalist movement - op art. Five bright objects combine ephemeral and durable, light and heavy materials - bronze castings are covered with fabric and painted with acrylic paints.

Michelangelo Pistoletto's Venus of the Rags, which, together with three other works of his, occupies the room where Matisse's famous panels used to hang, is perhaps the artist's most famous work. It exists in several different versions, among which there is even a performative one - in 1980 in San Francisco, the place of the sculpture was occupied by a living model. One of the three works, one of the first made in 1967, is presented in the Hermitage. All Venuses are slightly different in size, so it's interesting to wonder what would happen if a bunch of clothes turned a different shade or grew in size in the same way that the production of clothes has increased over the years? The criticism of consumer society, which eventually came to the fore in this work, was not the artist’s main idea. Like other masters of arte povera, Pistoletto was more interested in the plastic and semantic contrast of juxtaposing a stone statue with a heap of fabrics. Similar plastic possibilities of mountains of colorful clothes were then used by Christian Boltanski in his 2010 installation Personnes at the Grand Palais.

Fragment of the exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough" with works by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Photo: State Hermitage Museum

Just like “Rag Venus,” Mario Merz’s “Igloo with a Tree” is famous. This work (also existing in several original copies) is capable of changing any space in which it is exhibited, and the Hermitage hall with windows overlooking Palace Square was no exception. The outwardly fragile glass structure has both visual lightness and certainty. Over the years, its incompleteness turns into a special kind of monumentality, capable of resisting changing times in the same way that real Eskimo dwellings resist nature.

The coda to the entire exhibition is Marisa Merz’s 1997 work “Untitled” - a small fountain above a paraffin violin in a lead bath, unexpectedly standing alongside the palace fountains. The water that quietly flows from the center of the wax violin expresses that constancy of weak force that helped Arte Povera to win in historical perspective, becoming on a par with the jewelry of the Hermitage.

What color is the letter O how to depict emptiness or unravel the communication language of insects - in Russian schools and schools near abroad they continue to be surprised by questions Olympiad "Breakthrough" and the responses of its participants.
The uniqueness of the Olympiad is that it is heuristic, that is, it contains many search tasks. Our goal is not to simply test the child. Our Olympiad allows you to “spur” ability to analyze, summarize and synthesize information, and therefore comprehensively promotes the development of young creators.

About the Olympics

Autonomous non-profit organization of additional professional education "Interregional Center for Innovative Technologies in Education"
February 27 - March 2, 2019 conducts X II International meta-subject Olympiad of scientific creativity "Breakthrough".

All interested students in grades 7-11 of educational institutions of the Russian Federation and CIS countries can take part in the Olympiad.

1 09.10.2018 Accepting applications
2 27.02.2019 First stage
3 15.04.2019 Results of the first stage
4 22.04.2019 Final stage
5 20.05.2019 Winners Announcement

First (qualifying) stage olympiads:

Traditionally, all interested students pass this stage of the Olympiad at your school. In 2019 it will be held February 27, 28 and March 1, 2. The specific time of the event is chosen by the educational institution. Students will be offered 6 creative tasks, the implementation of which allows you to apply standard knowledge in a non-standard situation; When performing such tasks, the student can demonstrate the ability to classify, generalize and draw analogies, predict the result using intuition, imagination and fantasy.

To participate in the first stage you must from October 9, 2018 to February 4, 2019 submit an application and pay the registration fee in one of the provided ways in the amount of 100 rubles for each participant (for orphanages, boarding schools - 50 rubles for each participant).

All participants in the first stage receive certificates. When submitting an application from three participants, printed certificates and original souvenirs are provided.

Second (final) stageOlympiads - distance:

The second stage will take place in 2019 from April 22 to April 28 remotely. All participants who have passed the second stage will receive access at a predetermined time to complete Olympiad tasks online on the website www.site. The winners of the first stage take part in the second stage (the results are summed up according to parallels).

Participation in the second stage is free. All participants in the second stage receive diplomas and memorable prizes, the winners receive unique medals.
Participation in the Olympiad gives high school students the opportunity replenish your portfolio, get extra points when submitting documents and increase your chances of entering universities.

The Olympiad is held in accordance with Part 2 of Art. 77 of the Federal Law of the Russian Federation “On Education in the Russian Federation” No. 273-FZ of December 29, 2012.

The main differences between this Olympiad and others are as follows:

assessing the quality of education through assessing the meta-subject results of students mastering general education programs;
Participation and victory do not require special and deep knowledge in any field of knowledge; moreover, children with low academic achievements can show high results: it is precisely these children who are characterized by “hidden” talent;
identification and educational and methodological support of gifted children;
the Olympiad tasks are practice-oriented, problem-based, research tasks; the approach to solving them can be varied: from life observations to the use of extracurricular knowledge and scientific apparatus;
promotion of scientific knowledge.

Examples of tasks:

Situation 1. Amazing mirrors. If you take two mirrors, connect them at an angle of 90° to each other and put a person between them, you will get three reflections: one in front and two on the right and left - a total of 4 people along with the original. If we draw half a ball in front of the mirrors as was done in the picture on the right, then we will see two whole balls. Draw how to arrange objects in the corner mirror so that it turns out: 4 people and one ball; 6 people; 5 balls. Offer your options.

Situation 2. Wait, locomotive, don’t knock the wheels... Wheel knocking occurs due to the joints of the rails. If you make smaller joints, the knocking will be quieter. But according to the rules, the joints must be of a certain size. What is this connected with? Give examples where else in life a similar effect is used.

Situation 3. "Repetitions." In the phrase “The barbarian cook, the barbarian, the barbarian stole,” the word “var” appears as many as 6 times, and in the phrase “Mumu’s mind is full of thoughts,” the word “mind” can be seen 4 times. Come up with such meaningful “repetitions” too.

Situation 4. Almost brothers. Pay attention to the words “signature” and “painting”. They are very close in sound, but do not have the same meaning. Or a couple of words “dress” and “put on.” Such pairs are called paronyms (gr. para - near and onima - name). Explain what the difference is in the following pairs of phrases: “annual leave” and “annual leave”; "neighbor's house" and "neighbor's house". Give 3-4 of your nicknames and give them an explanation.

Situation 5. Unshakable cat. It’s not uncommon to see a stray cat in a store; sometimes she even climbs into the window and sleeps there. Imagine that such a cat cannot be kicked out of the store; it constantly returns and sleeps in the window. Suggest a way to turn harm into benefit.

Situation 6. Caring ants. We are not the only ones who care about preserving nature, in particular trees: on the American continent, “caring” ants live in the cavities of trees. They cultivate the trees they like and help them grow so that the population can live. Explain how ants manage to “grow” trees: after all, unlike people, they cannot go out to plant in an organized manner.

Situation 7. Unfamiliar Internet. Imagine having to explain to natives who have never known civilization what the Internet is. They don't understand your language. Draw the images that would help them understand what the Internet is as accurately as possible.

Situation 8. Consistent nature. In philosophy, as you probably know, the law of unity and struggle of opposites is formulated. According to him, through the struggle of opposing forces, sides, properties, all objects of the world develop, including social systems, man and his spirituality. Depict your understanding of this philosophical law using various objects.

On May 17, 2018, the exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough”, which will present more than 50 works by Italian artists of the second half of the 20th century from the Museum of Modern Art Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli-Turin, Italy), the GAM Gallery of Contemporary Art (Turin, Italy) and from private collections (Italy).

The exhibition is organized by the State Hermitage and the Museum of Contemporary Art Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli-Turin) with the participation of the GAM Gallery of Contemporary Art (Turin), through the mediation of Villaggio Globale International and with the support of Lavazza (Italy).

Arte povera (“poor art”) is a movement that emerged in Italy at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. A distinctive feature of the movement was the desire of the authors to move away from all-consuming technical progress towards craft creativity. By rejecting industrial and high-tech materials in favor of “poor” and unaesthetic materials, such as rags, newspapers, and tree branches, the artists of Arte Povera were determined to free art from the shackles of traditionalism. Close attention to materials and processes of creative production became a commonplace for authors who established a new artistic aesthetics in European art. The term "Arte Povera" was first used in 1967 by Italian critic and curator Germano Celant.

The exhibition will be located in the legendary halls of the third floor of the Winter Palace, the decor of which was conceived just at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Today it seems that these halls subtly resemble the spaces of the Berne Kunsthalle - the place from which the international recognition of Arte Povera began. The exhibition will include works of Arte Povera by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Gilberto Zorio, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini.

Throughout the twentieth century, Italian art has repeatedly attempted to offer the established artistic system a radically new vision of the creative process. The Italian avant-garde, through the efforts of the Futurists, sought to emphasize the connection between art and technological processes, the scale of which in the first half of the 1910s was capable of turning the usual perception of the world upside down. The industrial breakthrough of that time prompted artists to look for new principles for representing reality, adequate to the increasing pace of urban life. Almost at the same time, Giorgio de Chirico, with his "metaphysical painting", took an anti-modernist position, emphasizing the importance of artisanal principles of work as fundamental to art. The contextual premises of the post-war art of Italy - Alberto Burri, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana - which were reflected in the work of Arte Povera artists turned out to be just as anti-technological. The works of these forerunners of Arte Povera open the Hermitage exhibition.

Italy's dramatic economic recovery in the 1950s and 1960s, fueled by industrial development, led to the establishment of an advanced consumer culture. The desire of Arte Povera artists to resist the system of capitalism that suppresses creative freedom gave their art a political overtone. At the same time, their works provided references to the historical past of Italy, a country that for many centuries has shown the world outstanding masters of art. However, the fate of Arte Povera was not limited to the fate of a short-term local phenomenon. This did not happen in large part due to the wide range of themes chosen by the artists. The complexity and multi-level nature of creative gestures and the conceptualist rethinking of the artistic processes of Arte Povera do not allow this movement to be interpreted as exclusively reactionist. One of the reasons is the ability of the movement’s representatives to combine a critical rethinking of the country’s present with a romanticizing view of Italy’s past. All this gave their works poetic lightness and openness to dialogue. Despite the fact that the artists were united according to a number of similarities in their work, each of them created their own recognizable style, which is of independent artistic value. And even though the movement officially existed for no more than ten years, its participants continued their initial creative quests independently, without trying to manipulate the term that united them.

When talking about Art Povera, we usually mean works by specific authors created in a specific time period. A distinctive feature of these works is “poverty,” that is, the emphasized simplicity of the selected materials. Artists use everyday objects that in everyday life do not evoke associations with art. Another characteristic feature of Arte Povera can be called a fundamentally new understanding of the “product” of art, for which “liveliness” and the ability to maintain the “energy process” turn out to be important. Many of the works presented at the exhibition are like autonomous systems, capable of living their own lives and asserting the self-sufficiency of the artistic gesture. The materials used by the artists, be it concrete (Anselmo, Zorio), industrial products (Kunellis, Mario Merz), mirrors (Pistoletto, Fabro), simultaneously refer to both industrial production and artisanal methods of work. Exactly 50 years ago, the artists of Arte Povera made an incredible creative revolution, establishing the freedom of the language of art from belonging to any strict system, and laid the foundations of a new aesthetics, the significance of which remains extremely high today.

Exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough” takes place within the framework of the “Hermitage 20/21” project, designed to collect, exhibit, and study art of the 20th-21st centuries. Curators of the exhibition: Dmitry Yuryevich Ozerkov, head of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage, Anastasia Chaladze, employee of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage, and Caroline Christov-Bakargiev (Museum of Contemporary Art Castello di Rivoli).

An illustrated brochure has been prepared for the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2018).

The exhibition is accompanied by a large educational program, including a series of lectures, a gallery talk at the exhibition, a festival of installations and performances, and an intellectual marathon.

When: May 15 - August 16, 2018

The Arte Povera survey exhibition at the Hermitage celebrates the half-century anniversary of the association of artists whose views and principles of work were formulated and presented to the world by art historian and curator Germano Celant. “Poor art” does not imply a lack of resources among artists, but only their use of simple materials, elementary proportions and gestures, which are not always visible and noticeable to the viewer. Turin, Milan and Genoa authors of the seventies pushed the boundaries of art, creating works from the resources of the pre-industrial era, contrasting their works with the products of industrial society.

Lucio Fontana "Spatial Concept: Waiting", 1964

Canvas, water-based paint, 115.5 × 191.5 cm

Provided with the support of the Turin Museum Foundation

GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino

Courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei Photo Studio fotografico Gonella

The Hermitage exhibition tries to tell us the whole history and all aspects of the work of the participants in the movement, to present its predecessors, as well as works created after the collapse of the group, as the artists continued their search for the “poor” outside the association. The exhibition is built on objects from the Castello di Rivoli (its director Caroline Christov-Bakargiev curated the project together with Dmitry Ozerkov), the GAM gallery of contemporary art, as well as works from private collections. Each author is given his own room, where the specifics of his work are revealed as widely as possible.

The rooms dedicated to Italian artists are spaces where the Impressionists used to be exhibited. Caroline Christov-Bakargiev specifically emphasizes their similarity to the premises of the Kunsthalle Bern, where the famous exhibition “When Relationships Take Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information” took place in 1969 and where Arte Povera artists were directly involved.

The Berne exhibition became the most important event in European art, and the exhibition in the Hermitage is also epoch-making for the Russian space. The fact is that even now, fifty years later, the movement, which influenced virtually all subsequent art, remains almost unknown to our audience. Several works were exhibited in 2011 at the Multimedia Art Museum, but nothing more. Not a single publication has been translated into Russian, and the authors of many articles written by Russian authors base their arguments on their own impressions, and not on the original texts of Italian artists and leading critics. The St. Petersburg project set itself the task of finally acquainting Russian viewers and art historians with real works, but, unfortunately, not with real texts, since the introductory explanations to the artists’ halls were written anew, with all the abundance of author’s comments and interviews. There are also not enough texts by Chelant as the person who actually came up with this direction, in any case, formalized it ideologically and described all aspects as clearly and clearly as possible.

Mario Merz "What to do?", 1968

Metal container, neon, wax, 14.4 × 45 × 17.8 cm

Guido and Ettore de Fornaris Foundation

Gallery of Contemporary Art GAM, Turin

Fondazione Guido ed Ettore De Fornaris

GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino Photo

The exhibition develops from the first experiments with materials carried out by Alberto Burri in a series of burlap, and the spatial searches of Lucio Fontana, these artists did not belong to the circle, but it was from their research that the authors of Arte Povera grew up. Pier Paolo Calzorali performs a “Homage to Fontane”, where, using a mechanical installation, objects are covered with ice condensation and acquire new shapes and surface qualities. In his “Tent” object, Gilberto Zorio evaporates salt water, while his sculpture “Pink-Blue-Pink” changes color in response to air humidity. And in the work of Mario Merz “What to do?” neon sign "Che Fare?" melts beeswax into an aluminum mold, informing us of the processual nature of art. These and many other Arte Povera works are fragile and unstable. That is why the Hermitage has limited access to them - this was probably required by safety regulations, but it’s a pity, since in museums around the world before this, viewers had the opportunity to walk around the sculptures and get closer to them. For example, the work of Mario Merz “Igloo with a tree” is isolated from visitors - the emblem of the entire movement, where the author compares two types of materials - wood created by nature and glass developed by man. The point is in the viewer's physical experience of this juxtaposition, its instability and fragility, and the artist's idea was that everyone could come closer and feel it. By and large, the revolutionary nature of Arte Povera artists lies precisely in the presentation of the fragility and ephemerality of our world, in attention to the fleeting and fleeting “here and now”. And when we read this in the works of our contemporaries, we can be sure that they learned this from their Italian predecessors.

Based on these considerations, we can say that the best exhibited is the work of Giuseppe Penone, the youngest member of the group, whose main theme is the diversity of relationships between nature and man. His sculpture “Ideas in Stone” features massive boulders supposedly growing on thin tree trunks, and is displayed in the Hermitage courtyard against the backdrop of its formal architecture, creating additional meanings and balancing between natural and cultural context.

Giuseppe Penone “Ideas from stone - 1372 kg of light”, 2010

On 16 May 2018, the exhibition “Arte Povera. A Creative Revolution” opened in the State Hermitage. It presents over 50 works by Italian artists of the second half of the 20th century from the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli-Turin, Italy), GAM - the Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin, Italy) and private Italian collections.

The exhibition is organized by Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli-Torino) and The State Hermitage Museum with the participation of GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin).

“We have something Italian going on all the time,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, said at the opening ceremony. “Yesterday we signed an agreement with the Italian comune Reggio Emilia, and today we are opening the latest exhibition of Italian art, the latest exhibition of contemporary art and the latest exhibition organized under our agreement with Turin. We are presenting a superb display devoted to Arte Povera, one of the most famous tendencies in 20th-century art. It arose as a protest against Futurism that glorified the modern world, machinery and the future. As a protest, artists began to turn to simple things, creating the Arte Povera movement. We are exhibiting the Arte Povera in the halls of the top floor, from where the classical art was moved quite some time ago now, but the top floor of the Hermitage is a symbol that has educated more than one generation. We were very keen to present this exhibition and it has been several years in the making. This exhibition has not been easy at all. It identified one more problem: it is hard to display contemporary art in palaces – you need to have an electricity supply. New art needs considerably more attention than the classical sort.”

At the opening ceremony Mikhail Piotrovsky greeted Antonella Parigi, Counsellor for Culture of the Piedmont region; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli and curator of the exhibition; Marcella Beccaria, Chief Curator of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli; and Leonardo Bencini, Consul General of Italy in Saint Petersburg. The Hermitage Director also thanked Maurizio Cecconi, CEO of Villagio Globale International, and the Lavazza company for supporting the exhibition.

Arte Povera is still relevant “since it is synonymous with artistic freedom and profound ecological thinking, something to look to when trying to formulate a resistance to the hyper-technological society of consumption in our artificial globalized world,” states Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. “For these artists,” she continues, “nature and culture are mutually defined and related, since nature is a cultural notion, whereas culture is not absent in nature but is subject to its rules. This attitude is particularly important today, at a time when the boundaries between the natural and the artificial grow feeble. Arte Povera artists joined an appreciation for everyday life with the respect and interest for art tradition through the centuries by creating a body of original, non-conventional, and non-dogmatic works. Mistrustful of any artistic manifestation that is too intellectual or virtuous, they were convinced that seeming incoherence could become a positive and creative value if interpreted with respect for the complexity of life. They expanded the fields of painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and photography, often shifting from one medium and one technique to another without worrying about finding a unique and shared style.”

“Arte Povera” is the third exhibition to be part of the project of collaboration with the Lavazza company. “For Lavazza it is a great honor to be presenting the exhibition “Arte Povera.” “A Creative Revolution” at the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, on the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the movement that transformed contemporary art,” Francesca Lavazza, a member of the Luigi Lavazza S.p.A. board of directors, said. “With this retrospective the company is continuing its long-standing collaboration with the famous museum and taking one more step in the development of unique projects in the realm of art and culture worldwide.”

Arte Povera – “poor or impoverished art” – is a tendency that appeared in Italy around the turn of the 1970s. The distinctive feature of the movement became its members’ striving to move away from all-consuming technical progress towards artisanal creativity. Rejecting industrial and hi-tech materials in favor of “poor” and unaesthetic ones such as rags, newspapers or tree branches, the exponents of Arte Povera were intent on liberating art from the fetters of traditionalism. Unwavering attention to the materials and processes of creative production became a common feature for artists who established a new aesthetic in European art. The term Arte Povera was first used in 1967 by the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant.

The display is housed in the legendary halls on the top floor of the Winter Palace, the decoration of which was also conceived at the turn of the 1970s. Today it seems that these rooms resemble in some elusive way the setting of the Kunsthalle in Berne – the venue with which international recognition of Arte Povera began. The exhibition includes works by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighhiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio.

The exhibition “Arte Povera. A Creative Revolution” is being held as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project that aims to collect, exhibit and study art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition has been co-curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Dimitri Ozerkov, Head of the State Hermitage's Department of Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Anastasiya Chaladze, a member of the department staff .

An illustrated brochure has been prepared for the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2018).

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive educational program including a series of lectures, a gallery talk at the exhibition, a festival of installations and performances, and an intellectual marathon.

The exhibition is taking place as part of the Hermitage–Italy Foundation’s projects through the agency of Villaggio Globale International.

The exhibition is organized with the support of Lavazza, Italy.