In this artist’s book, Piero Gilardi reveals his working methods and explains how to create sculptures like those he has produced since the early 1960s. A pioneer of Arte Povera and a proud advocate of an ecologically concerned undertaking in the visual arts, Gilardi is also a political activist. The technique he developed for his sculptures has often been applied to produce masks, signs, and props for rallies and demonstrations, as this book and an interview with Andrea Bellini explains. For all this and for much more—his design and fashion creations, his social endeavors, etc.—Piero Gilardi is emblematic of the evolution of art and society over the last five decades. He is an artist whose works and theoretical research are still relevant to map what art might achieve and how art might be useful in the “real world.”

The first comprehensive monograph on the pioneer of Arte Povera, inventor of a “relational aesthetics” in the 1960s, political activist, and advocate of an ecologically concerned undertaking in the visual arts.

Piero Gilardi (born 1942 in Torino) is a pioneer of Arte Povera and a proud advocate of an ecological-concerned undertaking in visual arts. He is a peripatetic artist who gathered information about experimental art and creators in the 1960s, promoting the work of Richard Long or Jan Dibbets, and introducing Bruce Nauman or Eva Hesse into Europe. He is also a political activist who marched with FIAT workers in the 1970s, and who founded, in the 2000s the Living Art Park, commissioning earthworks to contemporary artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster or Lara Almarcegui.

Published on the occasion of Piero Gilardi’s 2003 exhibition at Costantini Arte Contemporanea e il Torchio Galleria d’Arte, Milan.

Piero Gilardi’s artistic practice is certainly an early statement about this evolution into a machine-made and financialized nature. From his role as one of the early protagonists of Arte Povera, to his collective actions organized for protests, and since 2008 the development of his initiative Parco de Arte Vivente in Turin, Gilardi has forged a distinctive unity between artistic practice and activism.

Since 1963 Gilardi has produced large, hyper-realistic sculptures of polyurethane foam, the so-called Nature Carpets. With these interactive sculptures he tries to give new meaning to interaction between viewer and artwork and nature and culture.