Artnet News: Italian Artist Piero Gilardi’s Radical Carved-Foam ‘Nature Carpets’ Were Decades Ahead of the Curve. His First Solo U.S. Show Demonstrates Why

One Sunday circa 1965, while strolling along the Sangone river in his hometown of Turin, Italy, the artist Piero Gilardi stumbled upon something all too ordinary that would inspire an extraordinary new direction in his practice: a pile of trash. This was just a few years after the publication Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but a few decades before “sustainability” became a global buzzword—and the resulting series of works was nothing short of radical.