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.

Prague-based artist Běla Kolářová (1923–2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives.” In the late sixties Kolářová increasingly began creating assemblages out of found objects including household items such as snap fasteners, needles and safety pins. Kolářová arranged these objects according to conceptual grids, and thus they are somewhat akin to the work of Nouveaux Realistes as well as to various conceptual practices. The work she produced in this way defied the aesthetic canon of Socialist Realism, and Kolářová developed a remarkable conceptual feminist style that was all her own.

In recent years, Kolářová’s work was shown at the documenta 12 (2007), at Raven Row in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umění in Olomouc (2007).