PAV Parco Arte Vivente investigates the beginnings of Piero Gilardi and his contribution to the origin of arte povera

PAV Parco Arte Vivente presents as part of Artissima the exhibition Car Crash. Piero Gilardi and Arte Povera, curated by Marco Scotini. The exhibition, which can be visited Nov. 4, 2023 to April 28, 2024, aims to investigate the production of Piero Gilardi (Turin, 1942-2023) during the 1960s and offer itself as a tribute to the founder of PAV. The itinerary focuses on a rich, albeit brief, moment(five years in all) characterized by Gilardi’s involvement in some of the most important stages of the Arte Poverista movement, including the Arte Abitabile exhibition (1966) at the Sperone Gallery, the creation of the Deposito d’Arte Presente in Turin (1967-1969), the theory of micro-emotive art, until his definitive enfranchisement from the movement with the arte povera plus azioni povere exhibition at the arsenals of Amalfi (1968). The beginnings of the artist’s career are then traced by exploring the years from 1964 to 1969, in which Gilardi’s multiple interests and his great contribution to the origin of the arte povera movement are already outlined. Car Crash is the first in a series of monographic exhibitions in a long-term PAV project that, following a chronological partition, will delve into the artist’s work.

From the very beginning, there emerged in Piero Gilardi an interest in the relationship between technology, human beings and nature and a desire to create functional works of art animated by the viewer, as well as an openness to other disciplines, such as his experiences in the field of radical design in the late 1960s. His is a tireless desire to understand and theorize the deeper meaning of art and the work of artists encountered internationally and domestically, moving from inventor of form to inventor of formations-his definition of “micro-emotional art” is an example.

This commitment is evidenced by letters written to friends and colleagues and correspondence for Flash Art magazine sent from New York and various European cities, and anticipates the importance of his theoretical contribution to two exhibitions such as Op Losse Schroeven (Amsterdam, 1969) and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern, 1969). Gilardi stands critically before the mechanisms that govern the system and the art market, and it is for this reason that from 1969 he chose to temporarily distance himself from the national and international art scene in order to devote himself to political activism. in continuity with the demands raised by the political movements of Sixty-eight.

The title of the exhibition, Car Crash, which refers to a project that was never realized for the Piper Pluriclub in Turin in which Gilardi evokes the image of “a car silently sliding on the black oil of the floor,” is meant to be a metaphor for those sulphurous years during which the encounter and clash with the art system and the construction and deconstruction of relationships, theories and imaginaries are a sign of the high stakes of art at that time.

The PAV exhibition opens precisely with the Piper experience and the exhibition of the carpet-nature set up inside the venue in January 1967. The disco, or rather the Turin “amusement factory,” taking up Tommaso Trini’s definition of it.

Gilardi’s openness to an art designed to be experienced and to directly involve the public takes shape right from the birth of the tappeti-natura, environments made of polyurethane foam to be walked on and inhabited, which the artist has been working on since 1965. The series of works stems from a suggestion he had during a nature walk along the bed of the Sangone stream near Turin, during which the artist came across a pile of garbage abandoned on the bank. Hence the desire to create forms representative of an ideal natural context but using an artificial and contemporary material such as polyurethane foam, a technology that allows the creation of “practically usable aesthetic objects.”

Finally, it is during those years that Gilardi’s multifaceted activity sees the elaboration of the foam rubber processing method and specifically the artist’s invention of a manipulation-resistant coloring and finishing process. Formula that is applied to the industrial production of bold design products through collaboration with the Gufram company. An encounter that gave birth to the iconic Sedilsasso (1968), a pouf designed by Gilardi himself, and other products that were part of the ferment generated by radical Italian design later recognized on an international scale with the exhibition Italy, The New Domestic Landscape, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in September 1972.

Car Crash - Piero Gilardi and Arte Povera intends to recount the young artist through three fundamental themes, such as extra-artistic space, from pop costume to political costume, and the production of useful art, with the aim of going to the root of his work and raising the main questions of his practice that, developing over a long career, led to the founding of PAV Parco Arte Vivente.

The documents and works in the exhibition have been collected through collaboration with Archivio Domus, Archivio Fotografico Enrico Cattaneo, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Archivio Derossi Associati, Centro di Ricerca Castello di Rivoli (CRRI), Fondazione Centro Studi Piero Gilardi, Fondazione Merz, Galleria Giraldi, Galleria Lia Rumma, Gufram.

As part of the exhibition, PAV’s Educational and Training Activities offers schools and groups a rich program of activities entirely dedicated to Piero Gilardi’s methodological research and works, which can be viewed on the website. For families, by reservation only, a special visit to Gilardi’s interactive Bioma trail is scheduled on the second Sunday of each month, followed by the activation of Gilardi’s pedagogical work Puzzle-nature Marina delle Canarie (2015, 53 elements of polyurethane foam, rubber latex, wicker basket). A fully assemblable interactive work that contains stones, shells, sea urchins, palm fragments, volcanic or grassy clods of earth. The puzzle is available to visitors who are invited to interact with the work by creating ever-changing shapes.

The exhibition is realized with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT, the Piedmont Region and the City of Turin.

Pictured: Piero Gilardi in his atelier in Via Pastrengo, 28. Turin, 1967

PAV Parco Arte Vivente investigates the beginnings of Piero Gilardi and his contribution to the origin of arte povera

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