Arte Povera

Arte Povera (translated as “poor art”) was a radical, conceptual Italian art movement that flourished in the 1960s and ’70s. Through sculpture and performance, the visionaries of Arte Povera rejected the art world establishment by turning to mediums and materials that were ephemeral, cheap, and unconventional, such as ballpoint pens, rocks, twigs, rope, and even heads of lettuce. “Some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments,” Alighiero Boetti remembers. On the auction market, record sales for Arte Povera include Giovanni Anselmo’s Torsione (1968) at $6.4 million, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Man Looking at a Negative (1967) at $4.8 million, and Luciano Fabro’s Italy of the Emigrant (1981) at $4.1 million.