Germano Celant

The well-known curator and art critic Germano Celant died yesterday at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. In 1967 he noticed a group of young Italian artists exhibiting at the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa. He understood the communicative power of their language and wrote the manifesto headlined it: Poor Art. Notes for a guerrilla. The Arte Povera was born, an artistic current that soon gained worldwide notoriety. For Celant he was the national and international springboard for his work as a critic and curator of important exhibitions. These include Identité Italienne at centre Pompidou in 1981, Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 at the Guggenheim in 1994, the 1997 Venice Biennale. Among the last are the three sumptuous anthology, the Venetian ones of 2019 by Emilio Isgrò and Jannis Kounellis, and that of Mimmo Rotella at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 2018 entitled Manifesto. Celant also wrote many essays and monographs on art, as well as curating important general catalogues of artists such as Piero Manzoni, Mimmo Rotella and others.

Tags: Germano Celant - Celant - Arte Povera - Emilio Isgrò - Jannis Kounellis - Mimmo Rotella