New York Galleries Celebrate 50 Years of Arte Povera

Galleria Luxembourg&Dayan in New York presents "Contingencies: Arte Povera and After" from October 23 to December 16, 2017, marking the 50th anniversary of the movement. The exhibition pairs works by contemporary artists with key Arte Povera pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, exploring the movement's legacy. Featured artists include Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Critic Germano Celant, who theorized the movement, noted that Arte Povera aims not to satisfy the system but to criticize and dissect it. The movement emerged in Italy during the economic miracle, challenging political-industrial systems and mass society through the use of poor and discarded materials. Meanwhile, Magazzino, a new museum in Cold Spring, New York, founded by collectors Giorgio Spanu and Nancy Olnick, houses around 400 works by artists including Paolini, Pistoletto, and Fabro. Designed by Spanish architect Miguel Quismondo in a rationalist style, the museum also features a library of 5,000 volumes and will host cultural events. The collection was built through international auctions and purchases from Margherita Stein, the Turin collector who died in 2003. In Italy, the MAXXI museum in Rome hosts "Nature Forever. Piero Gilardi" until October 15, 2017, a retrospective on the least "poorist" member of the movement, focusing on his ecological poetics.