Leçon de choses

Piero Gilardi, Leçon de choses
26 June – 7 November, 2010
Centre de Création Contemporaine de Tours

This exhibition, which is dedicated to Piero Gilardi, born in 1942 in Torino (Italy), signals the comeback to the French scene of an artist who was a decisive contributor to the birth of a movement that was to change European art drastically in the middle 1960′s: Arte Povera.

The brilliant inventor of the « Nature Carpets », which facilitated the dissemination of his works, Piero Gilardi endeavoured, from the start of this movement, to theorize and to guide reflection towards an « inhabitable » and « micro-emotional » art, a style that he claims himself in the name of the permanent interaction between the individual and his environment. A specific search conducted in the midst of a movement that advocates unfaltering commitment to bringing art and life together. This profoundly humanistic vision was expressed over the years equally in plastic, theoretical, and activist ways.

His plastic art proceeds almost exclusively by introducing nature fragments, daily life objects recreated in painted polyurethane foam, into the domestic living space, to invite the art lover to experience and to seize the works in concrete terms. But far from replaying a simple mimetic action, Piero Gilardi subjects the passage from source object to produced object to an aesthetic interpretation as well as to a physical interaction. In this sense, Gilardi’s works often, if not always, overlap with questions concerning design.

The exhibition shown at the Centre de Création Contemporaine – CCC de Tours from June 26th will bring together old and recent works to offer a glimpse of the patchwork of a comprehensive and atypical artist’s path.

Piero Gilardi lives and works in Torino. He had solo exhibitions at Semiose galerie, Paris (2009) ; Sperone-Westwater Gallery, New-York (1991); Ileana Sonnabend, Paris (1967) ; Gian Enzo Sperone, Torino (1966), and participated to the exhibitions Che Fare? Arte Povera, the historic years, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2010); Italics, Palazzo Grassi, Venezia (2008); Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Tate Modern, London / Walker Art Center, Minneapolis / Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles / Hirshhorn, Washington, (2001); Arte Abitabile, Gian Enzo Sperone gallery, Torino, (1966).

Piero Gilardi is represented by Semiose galerie, Paris.

For further information please contact:
Delphine Masson, head of exhibition and communication at CCC de Tours
 T: (+33) 02 47 66 50 00 / ccc.expo@wanadoo.fr

Centre de Création Contemporaine
CCC de Tours
55 rue Marcel Tribut
37 000 Tours France

opening hours : Wednesday – Saturday, 2 – 6 pm /Admission free

www.ccc-art.com