Piero Gilardi

Piero Gilardi (3 August 1942 – 5 March 2023) was a visual artist, theorist, art organizer and a catalytic figure in the Arte Povera movement as concentrated in Turin in the late 1960s.

Born in Italy to a Swiss family, he studied at the Liceo Artistico in Turin. In an interview with LeGrace G. Benson, Gilardi stated that his personal encounter with artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and others helped him in the development of his own artwork that developed in parallel with that of U.S.-based Pop Art and French Nouveau réalisme. While trying to comprehend the cybernetic idea of feedback and the scientific rationale behind prefrontal synthesis, his perspective on reality changed and he began to focus on the Fluxus movement and its relationship with banal things.

Gilardi's dedication to connecting neo-avant garde artists across Western Europe and North America made him one of the most influential artistic figures of the period, albeit not the most famous. Gilardi contributed to the birth of Arte Povera, especially working to establish relationships with other similar initiatives that occurred simultaneously outside Italy. Gilardi supported the work of artists such as Richard Long and Jan Dibbets and introduced the work of Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse to Europe. Gilardi's uncompromising commitment to closer ties between art and life led him to the fields of psychiatry and anthropology. Gilardi experimented with collective forms of political theater, workshops, and activist struggles with the workers of Fiat and against the implementation of TAV (Treni Alta Velocità: High Speed Trains) in the years 1970–80. During the 2000s, Gilardi initiated the outdoor project "Park of Living Art" in Turin, that welcomed artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gilles Clément, Almarcegui Lara, and Michel Blazy, as well as scientists. Here the public was invited to participate directly as a form of interactive art.