Piero Gilardi

Piero Gilardi (3 August 1942 – 5 March 2023) was a visual artist, theorist, art organizer and a catalytic figure in the Arte Povera movement as concentrated in Turin in the late 1960s.

Born in Italy to a Swiss family, he studied at the Liceo Artistico in Turin. In an interview with LeGrace G. Benson, Gilardi stated that his personal encounter with artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and others helped him in the development of his own artwork that developed in parallel with that of U.S.-based Pop Art and French Nouveau réalisme. While trying to comprehend the cybernetic idea of feedback and the scientific rationale behind prefrontal synthesis, his perspective on reality changed and he began to focus on the Fluxus movement and its relationship with banal things.

Gilardi's dedication to connecting neo-avant garde artists across Western Europe and North America made him one of the most influential artistic figures of the period, albeit not the most famous. Gilardi contributed to the birth of Arte Povera, especially working to establish relationships with other similar initiatives that occurred simultaneously outside Italy. Gilardi supported the work of artists such as Richard Long and Jan Dibbets and introduced the work of Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse to Europe. Gilardi's uncompromising commitment to closer ties between art and life led him to the fields of psychiatry and anthropology. Gilardi experimented with collective forms of political theater, workshops, and activist struggles

Early works

1960s

Gilardi was born in Turin of parents Mario Gilardi and Cecilia Lavelli. In 1963 he made his debut with an exhibition of Neodadaist Macchine per il Futuro at Galleria L'Immagine of Turin. He gained fame with the nature Carpets in 1965: these are works made of polyurethane, which reproduce in a very realistic style fragments of natural environment for recreational purposes, but also to report to a style of life which, with the passage of time becomes more and more artificial (Greto of stream, Gallery of Modern Art, Cagliari). These rugs were exposed to Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Milan, New York City, and Paris. From 1968 Gilardi stopped the production of works to participate in the theoretical development of new artistic trends: Arte Povera, Land Art and Antiform, participating in the years 1967 – 1968 as a contributor to the realization of the first two international shows of the new trend of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam such as at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland. The Stedelijk Museum displays date, in the section dedicated to the history of the museum, part of the correspondence between Gilardi and Wim Beeren, one of the curators of the museum.

From 1968 and for all the 1970s his artistic activity was accompanied by the formation of political activism in the so-called New Left (or far left), covering the artistic movements of collective creativity and the spontaneous, and he worked in various social environments, which offered themselves as contributions to the animation's cultural base. Creative experiences not only in Italy but also in Nicaragua, various countries in Africa, and in the territories of Native Americans in the United States of America contributed to the efforts as well. Gilardi returned to full artistic production in 1981, telling his own artistic and ideological discourse in a text entitled From art to life, from life to art, published that same year as his re-embrace of his own artistic production.

From 1985 he undertook an artistic research project with new technologies through the development of the project "IXIANA" which was presented at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, a technological park in which the general public could experience in an artistic sense, digital technologies. Later in a spurt of intense international activity he developed a series of interactive multimedia. Along with Claude Faure and Piotr Kowalski, he formed the International Association "Ars Technica", association connected to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie uniting philosophers, artists, and scientists such as Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, Jean-Louis Boissier, Jean-Max Albert, Sara Holt, and Jean-Claude Mocik who reflected on the relationship between art and new technologies.

As the head of the Italian section of Ars Technica he promoted international exhibitions in Turin, "Arslab Methods and Emotion" (1992) "Arslab, and Senses of Virtual" (1995), "Arslab, and The mazes of the body in the game (1999), and numerous opportunities for study in new media.

After Arte Povera in Italy Gilardi eventually moved away from the notions of Arte Povera and completely revamped his work (however, he still incorporated nature into his pieces). He became more involved in environmental work and focused on the importance of interaction and community in the social sphere.

Most of Gilardi's later work is united by a theme, or the interactions between work and spectator. Among the various creations "remember to install pulse", in which the heartbeat of the observer of the work – recorded by a sensor – determines changes to the whole; Absolut, forest of synthetic materials, translucent and cold shared emotion, involves two people in a performance interactive computing, referring to new approaches and exchange in society: virtual and globalized.

Gilardi devoted more than a decade to his most ambitious endeavor, the Parco Arte Vivente (Park of Living Art or PAV). A collaborative effort that grew from Gilardi's design, PAV is a monumental undertaking that transformed a disused parcel of land in the heart of Turin's working-class Lingotto district into a six-acre green space devoted to community, environmental, and artistic concerns. Commissioned earthworks by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Lara Almarcegui define the site and provide an ongoing place of exploration for city residents and visitors alike.

Gilardi worked on the Living Art Park of the City of Turin from 2002 on. He was the President of the undertaking. He was an artist contributing towards the creative direction of the project.

Books Gilardi published two books: "Dall'arte alla vita, dalla vita all'arte" (From art to life, from life to art), (1981) "Not for Sale", (2000)