A major survey of the post-war Italian movement Arte Povera—curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and featuring work by Pier Paolo Calzolari—opens October 9 at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection in Paris, France. Comprising more than 250 historic and contemporary works, Arte Povera explores both the Italian birth and the international emanation of this movement through works by the thirteen main protagonists of Arte Povera: Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio. Situated within the unique architecture of the Bourse de Commerce, transformed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the exhibition has been conceived as a landscape that one traverses and which becomes the terrain in which the infinite poetics of Arte Povera are rooted.
On October 9, Calzolari will be in conversation with curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and artists Giuseppe Penone, and Gilberto Zorio at the Bourse de Commerce.
Calzolari’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition, Casa ideale, at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Villa Paloma, Monaco in 2023–2024. In 2019, Calzolari was the subject of a major retrospective, Painting as a Butterfly, at the Madre Museum in Naples, Italy, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Andrea Villani. Calzolari’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana François Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy, among others. He has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Documenta IX, Kassel Germany; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, Venice Biennale, Italy; Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice, Italy; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. The artist lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.