5 Post-War Italian Artists to Know

An essential introduction to Italy’s most collectible names ahead of April’s modern and contemporary art auctions in Milan. Born in Turin in 1940, Alighiero Boetti is today recognized as one of Italy’s most important conceptual artists, and was a leading figure in the Arte Povera movement that revolutionized contemporary art at the end of the […]

Famous Abstract Artists that Changed the Way We Think About Painting

Abstract artists fast brought different genres and sub genres of abstraction into the dominant painting style of the 20th century. This influential avant-garde direction in painting derived from the request for “pure art”, non-figurative, non-objective and nonrepresentational artwork. The earliest movements toward contemporary abstraction were seen in Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism, where artists put a […]

The power of Piero Manzoni and his Merda d’Artista

In January 1957 the 23-year-old aristocratic Italian artist Piero Manzoni visited an exhibition of Yves Klein’s blue paintings at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. Manzoni had been a fairly conventional painter up until this visit. Yet, Klein’s display of canvas after canvas of unfaltering blue altered the way the young Italian saw and made art. If […]

Michelangelo Pistoletto: the artist with a smashing way to save the world

Pistoletto shook up the 60s with his arte povera revolution. What’s the legendary mirror-smasher doing now? Designing houses made of rice at his eco HQ. Born in Biella in 1933, Pistoletto grew up under fascism. “You had to believe – in God and in Mussolini. I felt there was a terrible contradiction in believing in a […]

10 Exhibitions That Changed the Course of Contemporary Art

If the title of Jens Hoffmann‘s latest exhibition. “Other Primary Structures,” rings a bell, it’s because it’s a revisiting one of the most important American art exhibitions of the 20th century: “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” the 1966 exhibition organized at the same museum by the pathbreaking curator Kynaston McShine that changed the aesthetic course of American art. […]

A Night of Fevered Bidding on Arte Povera at Christie’s London

London—The market for the relatively esoteric Italian art movement of the mid-1960s known as Arte Povera (Poor Art) took a giant leap forward at Christie’s on Tuesday evening with a single-owner sale that earned £38,427,400 ($63,020,930). The figure compared well to pre-sale expectations of £25.7-36.5 ($42.1-59.9 million). Of the very large number of offerings in the […]