art system, Art = Life Artists Michelangelo Pistoletto began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. In the later 1960s he began bringing together rags with casts of omnipresent classical statuary of Italy to break down the hierarchies of "art" and common things. An art of impoverished materials is certainly one aspect of the definition of Arte Povera. In his 1967 (Rag Wall), Pistoletto makes an exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric. Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz attempted to make the experience of art more immediately real while also more closely connecting the individual to nature. In his (Untitled /Twelve Horses), Kounellis brings the real, natural life into the gallery setting, by showing twelve horses racked-up on the gallery walls. Recalling the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp, his aim was to challenge what could be defined as art, but unlike Duchamp, maintains the objects real and alive, redefining the notion of life and art, while keeping both entities independent. Piero Gilardi, much like the aim of Arte Povera itself, was concerned with bridging the natural and the artificial. In his (Nature Carpets), 1965, which gained him recognition and assimilation into the Arte Povera movement, Gilardi built three-dimensional carpets out of polyurethane which used "natural" leaves, rocks, and soil as decoration, design and art meshed together to question societal sensibilities towards what is real and natural and how artificiality was being engrained into the contemporary commercialized world. List of artists Giovanni Anselmo Alighiero Boetti Alberto Burri Pier Paolo Calzolari Enrico Castellani Claudio Cintoli Luciano Fabro Piero Gilardi Jannis Kounellis Piero Manzoni Mario Merz Marisa Merz Giulio Paolini Pino Pascali Giuseppe Penone Gianni Piacentino Michelangelo Pistoletto Emilio Prini Guillem Ramos-Poquí Gilberto Zorio See also Jerzy Grotowski Nnenna Okore References References Celant, Germano, Arte Povera: Histories and Protagonists, Milan: Electa, 1985. (Republished as Arte Povera: History and Stories, 2011. ) Celant, Germano, Tommaso Trini, Jean-Christophe Ammann, Harald Szeemann and Ida Gianelli. Arte povera, Milan: Charta, 2001. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn (Ed.). Arte Povera. London: Phaidon, 1999. Flood, Richard, and Morris, Frances. Zero to infinity: Arte povera 1962-1972. London: Tate Publishing, 2001. Lista, Giovanni, L’Arte Povera, Cinq Continents Éditions, Milan-Paris, 2006. Lumley, Robert. Arte Povera. London: Tate Pub.; New York: Distributed in North America by Harry N. Abrams, 2004. , Jacopo Galimberti, "A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant's Invention of