W Magazine: Artist Piero Gilardi’s Surrealist Fashion Comes to Life Once More

At the Magazzino Italian Art museum in Cold Spring, New York—a white, modernist building that looks chic and minimal against the green pastures of Putnam County—there’s an entire room devoted to the works of the artist Piero Gilardi. A pioneer of the Arte Povera movement in the 1960s and ’70s, which saw Italian artists taking radical stances against institutions and systems of government, Gilardi’s career centered mostly on what he called Tappeto-Natura, or “nature carpets.” The “carpets” are, in fact, 3-D renderings of various nature scenes: pebbles on a beach, rollicking foamy waves with seagulls, the mossy forest ground, all done in polyurethane foam.

Not only are the nature carpets laid out on the floor of the nonprofit museum, which was founded by Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu in 2017 and received a significant renovation in 2020, but they’re also mounted onto the walls, like tactile paintings of sunflower fields and bushels of vegetables.