Arte Povera International

09 october 2011 - 19 february 2012

curated by Germano Celant and Beatrice Merz

From 9 October, 2011, the Castello di Rivoli will be presenting its own contribution to Germano Celant’s ambitious curatorial project: Arte Povera 2011.
The exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli, Arte Povera International, is curated with the show’s organiser and co-director of the museum, Beatrice Merz. Historic works by leading exponents of the movement will be on display in the grand rooms on the first and second floor of the splendid Savoyard residence, together with an equal number of artists from the international art scene of the same period.
Most of the works come from Italian museum collections and from the large network of private collectors who have shown an interest in Arte Povera since the 1960s. The selection of international artists took place through a careful academic research into the exhibitions that took place between 1966 and 1972, and which placed Arte Povera in dialogue with different and parallel international artistic currents.

The rooms of the Castello will host the independent presentation of each of the exponents of Arte Povera and a comparison with Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Art & Language, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Lothar Baumgarten, Bernd e Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Bill Bollinger, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, Hanne Darboven, Gino De Dominicis, Nicola De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Dan Flavin, Lucio Fontana, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Rebecca Horn, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Fausto Melotti, Reinhard Mucha, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Dennis Oppenheim, Edward Ruscha, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Salvatore Scarpitta, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner.
The specificity of the exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli lies in this meeting between themes and poetics from the international scene that saw the Italian movement thrust into an enthusiastic exchange with the languages and forms of dialogue of the other movements and artists of the time. The great energy applied by the exponents of Arte Povera in an international setting returns today to the city where it all began and to one of the museums that since its foundation has always had the help and contribution in terms of artworks and labour from the movement’s artists. The return of this powerful charge of thoughts, processes and materials presents a broad-ranging survey of Arte Povera and the only apparently very different forms of Land, Body and Conceptual Art.