Art movement: Arte Povera (known for their use of everyday materials: literally "poor" art)

Historical contextualization: Many of these Italian artists came of age after World War II, when the socio-economic landscape of Italy was rapidly transforming as it recovered from the devastation of the war. This was also a period of intense social upheaval. Students and workers united to protest unfair labor and education conditions. U.S. monetary aid sent to rebuild Europe’s economy helped to improve the production of material goods and repair infrastructure. At the same time, a new influx of American capitalist and consumer values was transforming Italian culture, which led many Italians to oppose U.S. influence, a reaction that was expressed through works of art. The U.S. military presence in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s led to heightened hostility among Europeans who grew increasingly critical of the violence occurring abroad.

Personal analysis: I thought this piece was interesting because the viewer must walk around several times to understand the quote. The audience is directly involved in trying to decipher the meaning of the words and its connection to the physical object. It reminds me of the artist in the movie Iron Giant (1999) that creates art out of scrap metal.

Questions: What types of places did artists from the movement find these materials?

Source (s): https://smarthistory.org/merz-giap-igloo/

For Kiefer, who had studied with the artists Peter Dreher in Karlsruhe and Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf, painting became the arena to vocalize and elucidate his contempt for the Nazis and their reprehensible legacy, instilling every brush stroke with palpable rage, grief, and shame. In the 1970s, Kiefer developed a signature style that was influenced in part by the Neo-expressionist style of Georg Baselitz, but also by his teacher Beuys, particularly Beuys’s tendency to use commonplace materials, such as fat and felt within his artistic practice. Kiefer augmented his thick layers of impasto with lead, glass, straw, wood, dried flowers, and more, yielding highly textured, viscous surfaces. As his list of materials grew, so too did the scale of his canvases, which though large and formidable, felt ephemeral and fragile as a result of the materials he utilized.
All of the canonical elements of Kiefer’s work are present in Shulamite—a thick impasto resulting from a hardened mixture of oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac; a brittle, textured surface infused with commonplace materials (in this case, straw and ash); mythological or biblical references (Shulamite refers to the heroine in the Song of Solomon); a literary reference (Celan’s “Death Fugue”); and a historical subject or location (a Nazi Memorial Hall in Berlin).