Artforum: Piero Gilardi

Italian artist Piero Gilardi, whose “Tappeti-Natura,” or “Nature- Carpets,” brought the wilderness into the gallery, died March 5 in Turin at the age of eighty. His death was confirmed by his gallery, Michel Rein. Gilardi in the 1960s set himself apart from his compatriots in the Arte Povera movement with his floor-bound works made of polyurethane blended with vinyl resin and rubber latex. Variously evoking environments such as a forest floor scattered with fallen logs, a rocky seashore, or a verdant field and laid flat on the floor, these sculptures invited visitors to relax upon them and thus become a part of the depicted scene. “The effect is an artificial nature in which surprises and the mysteries of true
nature stimulate the brain but flex elementally underfoot,” he said in 1966. Writing in the pages of Artforum in 2022, Elizabeth Gilardi noted that the playfulness of these sculptures, which yoke nature to the future, “belies the conceptual work and technical skill that went into making them, as well as the complexity of the postwar moment in which the Italian artist’s project first emerged.”