On 16 May 2018, the exhibition “Arte Povera. A Creative Revolution” opened in the State Hermitage. It presents over 50 works by Italian artists of the second half of the 20th century from the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli-Turin, Italy), GAM - the Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin, Italy) and private Italian collections.
The exhibition is organized by Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli-Torino) and The State Hermitage Museum with the participation of GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin).
“We have something Italian going on all the time,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, said at the opening ceremony. “Yesterday we signed an agreement with the Italian comune Reggio Emilia, and today we are opening the latest exhibition of Italian art, the latest exhibition of contemporary art and the latest exhibition organized under our agreement with Turin. We are presenting a superb display devoted to Arte Povera, one of the most famous tendencies in 20th-century art. It arose as a protest against Futurism that glorified the modern world, machinery and the future. As a protest, artists began to turn to simple things, creating the Arte Povera movement. We are exhibiting the Arte Povera in the halls of the top floor, from where the classical art was moved quite some time ago now, but the top floor of the Hermitage is a symbol that has educated more than one generation. We were very keen to present this exhibition and it has been several years in the making. This exhibition has not been easy at all. It identified one more problem: it is hard to display contemporary art in palaces – you need to have an electricity supply. New art needs considerably more attention than the classical sort.”
At the opening ceremony Mikhail Piotrovsky greeted Antonella Parigi, Counsellor for Culture of the Piedmont region; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli and curator of the exhibition; Marcella Beccaria, Chief Curator of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli; and Leonardo Bencini, Consul General of Italy in Saint Petersburg. The Hermitage Director also thanked Maurizio Cecconi, CEO of Villagio Globale International, and the Lavazza company for supporting the exhibition.
Arte Povera is still relevant “since it is synonymous with artistic freedom and profound ecological thinking, something to look to when trying to formulate a resistance to the hyper-technological society of consumption in our artificial globalized world,” states Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. “For these artists,” she continues, “nature and culture are mutually defined and related, since nature is a cultural notion, whereas culture is not absent in nature but is subject to its rules. This attitude is particularly important today, at a time when the boundaries between the natural and the artificial grow feeble. Arte Povera artists joined an appreciation for everyday life with the respect and interest for art tradition through the centuries by creating a body of original, non-conventional, and non-dogmatic works. Mistrustful of any artistic manifestation that is too intellectual or virtuous, they were convinced that seeming incoherence could become a positive and creative value if interpreted with respect for the complexity of life. They expanded the fields of painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and photography, often shifting from one medium and one technique to another without worrying about finding a unique and shared style.”
“Arte Povera” is the third exhibition to be part of the project of collaboration with the Lavazza company. “For Lavazza it is a great honor to be presenting the exhibition “Arte Povera.” “A Creative Revolution” at the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, on the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the movement that transformed contemporary art,” Francesca Lavazza, a member of the Luigi Lavazza S.p.A. board of directors, said. “With this retrospective the company is continuing its long-standing collaboration with the famous museum and taking one more step in the development of unique projects in the realm of art and culture worldwide.”
Arte Povera – “poor or impoverished art” – is a tendency that appeared in Italy around the turn of the 1970s. The distinctive feature of the movement became its members’ striving to move away from all-consuming technical progress towards artisanal creativity. Rejecting industrial and hi-tech materials in favor of “poor” and unaesthetic ones such as rags, newspapers or tree branches, the exponents of Arte Povera were intent on liberating art from the fetters of traditionalism. Unwavering attention to the materials and processes of creative production became a common feature for artists who established a new aesthetic in European art. The term Arte Povera was first used in 1967 by the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant.
The display is housed in the legendary halls on the top floor of the Winter Palace, the decoration of which was also conceived at the turn of the 1970s. Today it seems that these rooms resemble in some elusive way the setting of the Kunsthalle in Berne – the venue with which international recognition of Arte Povera began. The exhibition includes works by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighhiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio.
The exhibition “Arte Povera. A Creative Revolution” is being held as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project that aims to collect, exhibit and study art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition has been co-curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Dimitri Ozerkov, Head of the State Hermitage's Department of Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Anastasiya Chaladze, a member of the department staff .
An illustrated brochure has been prepared for the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2018).
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive educational program including a series of lectures, a gallery talk at the exhibition, a festival of installations and performances, and an intellectual marathon.
The exhibition is taking place as part of the Hermitage–Italy Foundation’s projects through the agency of Villaggio Globale International.
The exhibition is organized with the support of Lavazza, Italy.
This summer at Silver Mercury, a festival of advertising and marketing communications, I moderated the HR section “How to manage creative teams?” This is perhaps a key question for every leader, especially in the field of PR. I asked the best professionals in the field of marketing and PR - how to manage talent so that their genius works effectively even on vacation or in the smoking room? Here are some quotes and thoughts.
Photo: TV series “Mad Men”
During the discussion, Mikhail Umarov, managing partner of the Comunica agency, said that it is important to give creative people freedom and praise them. Irina Tikhomirova, HR Director of Ingosstrakh, said that we need to give them a chance to correct their mistakes. Alexander Murzov, a consultant at Odgers, believes that creative people are infected with the “virus” of vanity, and the art of a leader is to be a facilitator during a “fire.” Katerina Guvakova talked about her experience working at BBDO and convinced that creative people are not hysterical, and if they are sitting in a smoking room, then you just need to treat it with understanding and give the creative person a rest.
Much has been said about freedom and control, about a clear brief and the ability to “let go,” about easy manipulation to achieve results. Creative people are killed by banality; they want beautiful solutions, but at the other “pole” there is always a need to achieve specific goals. Activity should not be confused with productivity here.
The main recipe for managing creative people, to summarize all the conversations on this topic: “Give me absolute freedom of thoroughly defined brief.”
Here are a few quotes from recognized gurus in their field that I was able to collect for this conversation.
Andrey Braginsky, PR Director of the Moscow Exchange:
— A creative team is people who strive to do each next project in a new way, and do not repeat already found solutions. Their curiosity is important - to study where and what they do in the world, and come up with something of their own based on the best creative solutions. You need to manage: do not put pressure on authority, encourage more dialogue and discussion within the team, get rid of unnecessary bureaucracy, maintain a free and creative spirit in the team.
Daniil Proskurin, Marketing Director of Ingosstrakh:
— First, the creative team needs to be inspired, then let go, and then strictly controlled and administered so as not to miss the deadline and produce the result without losses. From idea to implementation, without clear management, everything can change and fade away. 
Ekaterina Sysoeva, Porsche Marketing Director:
— We need to give professionals freedom of thought. Don't limit them to the corporate "Bible". Then you get masterpieces. That is, you need to be able to hear.
Denis Terekhov, managing partner of the SNMG agency:
— The problem of managing a creative team is not even that creative people are not always able to meet deadlines. Creative individuals are individuals first and foremost, and only then employees. Sometimes the boss has to step on the throat of his song and even take over the routine. After all, in the end, it is creative people who are the engines of communication agencies.
Olga Dashevskaya, founder of the PR agency Inc:
— You can forgive geniuses a lot, but you shouldn’t over-praise them - genius often evaporates in inverse proportion to the growth of the crown. I usually tell my team that you are awesome, but always remember that someone can do it better than us. We always study talented cases of competitors, this helps us not to leave the ground for too long and grow.
Irina Bakhtina, vice president of communications at Unilever:
— How often do we see creative advertising that does not sell, but simply lives its own life, delighting the jury of advertising festivals, or creative packaging that helps highlight a product on the shelf, but makes its use absolutely inconvenient? The team's creativity must be directed in the right direction.
Sometimes you listen to an amazingly creative idea, enjoy the flight of thought of the authors, and then busily clarify: “What exactly is the problem that we are trying to solve now?” And the whole beautiful, elegant concept falls apart. Creators are passionate people, so they simply need to be systematically brought back to the goal and goal setting. Well, if the goal is clearly formulated, and the creators keep it in mind, then the result will exceed expectations. 
Oksana Belyaeva, ex-director of marketing at INTOUCH Insurance:
— It is important to maintain a balance between following the brief and the flight of the team’s creativity. Creatives should not be limited, but it is important to “gently lead” them in the right direction.
Yulia Koneva, national marketing director at McDonald's:
— Managing a creative team is difficult, since people have fundamentally different, non-financial motivations. In other words, they, of course, should, but are not required to, so the skills required are somewhat different than in project management.
Three things need to be done: it must be interesting to be with you, they must listen to you and, most importantly, they must love you. Therefore, it is necessary to set tasks that are interesting to them, and to show all the time that you understand and care about their interests. To be listened to, you need to have a good track record and help people improve their ideas and sell them within the organization. To be loved, you need to close the distance, praise and show your human insides. Do not be afraid.
“Managing creatives is like driving a rally car - if you are a good driver you will go really fast, if not you will end up in the middle of nowhere with the same speed” (Managing creative people is like driving a car in a race: if you are a good driver, you will drive very fast, if not, at the same speed you will only end up halfway to nowhere).
Anton Nazarov, director of public relations at Inter RAO:
— When managing a creative team, it is important to remember that this is not only creativity, but also production. Therefore, the main thing is not the process, but the result by a clearly defined deadline. We are not at the Olympics, where the main thing is participation. But constant and excessive control is contraindicated for creative people. The “golden mean” between prison and freedom is important.
Anastasia Plotnikova, Head of Brand Management Department, Gazprom Neft:
— The main difficulties in managing a creative team are that often team members have different formed visions and opinions about the project. They are always individualists with their own opinions, and effective team management is only possible with the support of everyone’s initiative and the formation of a general task (bid idea) taking into account each participant. You need to act by guiding ideologically and being the “center of assembly.”
Text: Olga Dementyeva, head of the HR4PR agency
On May 17, 2018, the exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough”, which will present more than 50 works by Italian artists of the second half of the 20th century from the Museum of Modern Art Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli-Turin, Italy), the GAM Gallery of Contemporary Art (Turin, Italy) and from private collections (Italy).
The exhibition is organized by the State Hermitage and the Museum of Contemporary Art Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli-Turin) with the participation of the GAM Gallery of Contemporary Art (Turin), through the mediation of Villaggio Globale International and with the support of Lavazza (Italy).
Arte povera (“poor art”) is a movement that emerged in Italy at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. A distinctive feature of the movement was the desire of the authors to move away from all-consuming technical progress towards craft creativity. By rejecting industrial and high-tech materials in favor of “poor” and unaesthetic materials, such as rags, newspapers, and tree branches, the artists of Arte Povera were determined to free art from the shackles of traditionalism. Close attention to materials and processes of creative production became a commonplace for authors who established a new artistic aesthetics in European art. The term "Arte Povera" was first used in 1967 by Italian critic and curator Germano Celant.
The exhibition will be located in the legendary halls of the third floor of the Winter Palace, the decor of which was conceived just at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Today it seems that these halls subtly resemble the spaces of the Berne Kunsthalle - the place from which the international recognition of Arte Povera began. The exhibition will include works of Arte Povera by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Gilberto Zorio, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini.
Throughout the twentieth century, Italian art has repeatedly attempted to offer the established artistic system a radically new vision of the creative process. The Italian avant-garde, through the efforts of the Futurists, sought to emphasize the connection between art and technological processes, the scale of which in the first half of the 1910s was capable of turning the usual perception of the world upside down. The industrial breakthrough of that time prompted artists to look for new principles for representing reality, adequate to the increasing pace of urban life. Almost at the same time, Giorgio de Chirico, with his "metaphysical painting", took an anti-modernist position, emphasizing the importance of artisanal principles of work as fundamental to art. The contextual premises of the post-war art of Italy - Alberto Burri, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana - which were reflected in the work of Arte Povera artists turned out to be just as anti-technological. The works of these forerunners of Arte Povera open the Hermitage exhibition.
Italy's dramatic economic recovery in the 1950s and 1960s, fueled by industrial development, led to the establishment of an advanced consumer culture. The desire of Arte Povera artists to resist the system of capitalism that suppresses creative freedom gave their art a political overtone. At the same time, their works provided references to the historical past of Italy, a country that for many centuries has shown the world outstanding masters of art. However, the fate of Arte Povera was not limited to the fate of a short-term local phenomenon. This did not happen in large part due to the wide range of themes chosen by the artists. The complexity and multi-level nature of creative gestures and the conceptualist rethinking of the artistic processes of Arte Povera do not allow this movement to be interpreted as exclusively reactionist. One of the reasons is the ability of the movement’s representatives to combine a critical rethinking of the country’s present with a romanticizing view of Italy’s past. All this gave their works poetic lightness and openness to dialogue. Despite the fact that the artists were united according to a number of similarities in their work, each of them created their own recognizable style, which is of independent artistic value. And even though the movement officially existed for no more than ten years, its participants continued their initial creative quests independently, without trying to manipulate the term that united them.
When talking about Art Povera, we usually mean works by specific authors created in a specific time period. A distinctive feature of these works is “poverty,” that is, the emphasized simplicity of the selected materials. Artists use everyday objects that in everyday life do not evoke associations with art. Another characteristic feature of Arte Povera can be called a fundamentally new understanding of the “product” of art, for which “liveliness” and the ability to maintain the “energy process” turn out to be important. Many of the works presented at the exhibition are like autonomous systems, capable of living their own lives and asserting the self-sufficiency of the artistic gesture. The materials used by the artists, be it concrete (Anselmo, Zorio), industrial products (Kunellis, Mario Merz), mirrors (Pistoletto, Fabro), simultaneously refer to both industrial production and artisanal methods of work. Exactly 50 years ago, the artists of Arte Povera made an incredible creative revolution, establishing the freedom of the language of art from belonging to any strict system, and laid the foundations of a new aesthetics, the significance of which remains extremely high today.
Exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough” takes place within the framework of the “Hermitage 20/21” project, designed to collect, exhibit, and study art of the 20th-21st centuries. Curators of the exhibition: Dmitry Yuryevich Ozerkov, head of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage, Anastasia Chaladze, employee of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage, and Caroline Christov-Bakargiev (Museum of Contemporary Art Castello di Rivoli).
An illustrated brochure has been prepared for the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2018).
The exhibition is accompanied by a large educational program, including a series of lectures, a gallery talk at the exhibition, a festival of installations and performances, and an intellectual marathon.
The Arte Povera survey exhibition at the Hermitage celebrates the half-century anniversary of the association of artists whose views and principles of work were formulated and presented to the world by art historian and curator Germano Celant. “Poor art” does not imply a lack of resources among artists, but only their use of simple materials, elementary proportions and gestures, which are not always visible and noticeable to the viewer. Turin, Milan and Genoa authors of the seventies pushed the boundaries of art, creating works from the resources of the pre-industrial era, contrasting their works with the products of industrial society.
Lucio Fontana “Spatial Concept: Waiting”, 1964
Canvas, water-based paint, 115.5 × 191.5 cm
Provided with the support of the Turin Museum Foundation
GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino
Courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei Photo Studio fotografico Gonella
The Hermitage exhibition tries to tell us the whole history and all aspects of the work of the participants in the movement, to present its predecessors, as well as works created after the collapse of the group, as the artists continued their search for the “poor” outside the association. The exhibition is built on objects from the Castello di Rivoli (its director Caroline Christov-Bakargiev curated the project together with Dmitry Ozerkov), the GAM gallery of contemporary art, as well as works from private collections. Each author is given his own room, where the specifics of his work are revealed as widely as possible.
The rooms dedicated to Italian artists are spaces where the Impressionists used to be exhibited. Caroline Christov-Bakargiev specifically emphasizes their similarity to the premises of the Kunsthalle Bern, where the famous exhibition “When Relationships Take Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information” took place in 1969 and where Arte Povera artists were directly involved.
The Berne exhibition became the most important event in European art, and the exhibition in the Hermitage is also epoch-making for the Russian space. The fact is that even now, fifty years later, the movement, which influenced virtually all subsequent art, remains almost unknown to our audience. Several works were exhibited in 2011 at the Multimedia Art Museum, but nothing more. Not a single publication has been translated into Russian, and the authors of many articles written by Russian authors base their arguments on their own impressions, and not on the original texts of Italian artists and leading critics. The St. Petersburg project set itself the task of finally acquainting Russian viewers and art historians with real works, but, unfortunately, not with real texts, since the introductory explanations to the artists’ halls were written anew, with all the abundance of author’s comments and interviews. There are also not enough texts by Chelant as the person who actually came up with this direction, in any case, formalized it ideologically and described all aspects as clearly and clearly as possible.
Mario Merz "What to do?", 1968
Metal container, neon, wax, 14.4 × 45 × 17.8 cm
Guido and Ettore de Fornaris Foundation
Gallery of Contemporary Art GAM, Turin
Fondazione Guido ed Ettore De Fornaris
GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino Photo
The exhibition develops from the first experiments with materials carried out by Alberto Burri in a series of burlap, and the spatial searches of Lucio Fontana, these artists did not belong to the circle, but it was from their research that the authors of Arte Povera grew up. Pier Paolo Calzorali performs a “Homage to Fontane”, where, using a mechanical installation, objects are covered with ice condensation and acquire new shapes and surface qualities. In his “Tent” object, Gilberto Zorio evaporates salt water, while his sculpture “Pink-Blue-Pink” changes color in response to air humidity. And in the work of Mario Merz “What to do?” neon sign "Che Fare?" melts beeswax into an aluminum mold, informing us of the processual nature of art. These and many other Arte Povera works are fragile and unstable. That is why the Hermitage has limited access to them - this was probably required by safety regulations, but it is a pity, since in museums around the world before this, viewers had the opportunity to walk around the sculptures and get closer to them. For example, the work of Mario Merz “Igloo with a tree” is isolated from visitors - the emblem of the entire movement, where the author compares two types of materials - wood created by nature and glass developed by man. The point is in the viewer's physical experience of this juxtaposition, its instability and fragility, and the artist's idea was that everyone could come closer and feel it. By and large, the revolutionary nature of Arte Povera artists lies precisely in the presentation of the fragility and ephemerality of our world, in attention to the fleeting and fleeting “here and now”. And when we read this in the works of our contemporaries, we can be sure that they learned this from their Italian predecessors.
Based on these considerations, we can say that the best exhibited is the work of Giuseppe Penone, the youngest member of the group, whose main theme is the diversity of relationships between nature and man. His sculpture “Ideas in Stone” features massive boulders supposedly growing on thin tree trunks, and is displayed in the Hermitage courtyard against the backdrop of its formal architecture, creating additional meanings and balancing between natural and cultural context.
Giuseppe Penone “Ideas from stone - 1372 kg of light”, 2010
What color is the letter O how to depict emptiness or unravel the communication language of insects - in Russian schools and schools near abroad they continue to be surprised by questions Olympiad "Breakthrough" and the responses of its participants.
The uniqueness of the Olympiad is that it is heuristic, that is, it contains many search tasks. Our goal is not to simply test the child. Our Olympiad allows you to “spur” ability to analyze, summarize and synthesize information, and therefore comprehensively promotes the development of young creators.
Autonomous non-profit organization of additional professional education "Interregional Center for Innovative Technologies in Education"
February 27 - March 2, 2019 conducts X II
International meta-subject Olympiad of scientific creativity "Breakthrough".
All interested students in grades 7-11 of educational institutions of the Russian Federation and CIS countries can take part in the Olympiad.
Traditionally, all interested students pass this stage of the Olympiad at your school. In 2019 it will be held February 27, 28 and March 1, 2. The specific time of the event is chosen by the educational institution. Students will be offered 6 creative tasks, the implementation of which allows you to apply standard knowledge in a non-standard situation; When performing such tasks, the student can demonstrate the ability to classify, generalize and draw analogies, predict the result using intuition, imagination and fantasy.
To participate in the first stage you must from October 9, 2018 to February 4, 2019 submit an application and pay the registration fee in one of the provided ways in the amount of 100 rubles for each participant (for orphanages, boarding schools - 50 rubles for each participant).
All participants in the first stage receive certificates. When submitting an application from three participants, printed certificates and original souvenirs are provided.
Participation in the second stage is free. All participants in the second stage receive diplomas and memorable prizes, the winners receive unique medals.
Participation in the Olympiad gives high school students the opportunity replenish your portfolio, get extra points when submitting documents and increase your chances of entering universities.
The Olympiad is held in accordance with Part 2 of Art. 77 of the Federal Law of the Russian Federation “On Education in the Russian Federation” No. 273-FZ of December 29, 2012.
Situation 1. Amazing mirrors. If you take two mirrors, connect them at an angle of 90° to each other and put a person between them, you will get three reflections: one in front and two on the right and left - a total of 4 people along with the original. If we draw half a ball in front of the mirrors as was done in the picture on the right, then we will see two whole balls. Draw how to arrange objects in the corner mirror so that it turns out: 4 people and one ball; 6 people; 5 balls. Offer your options.
Situation 2. Wait, locomotive, don’t knock the wheels... Wheel knocking occurs due to the joints of the rails. If you make smaller joints, the knocking will be quieter. But according to the rules, the joints must be of a certain size. What is this connected with? Give examples where else in life a similar effect is used.
Situation 3. "Repetitions." In the phrase “The barbarian cook, the barbarian, the barbarian stole,” the word “var” appears as many as 6 times, and in the phrase “Mumu’s mind is full of thoughts,” the word “mind” can be seen 4 times. Come up with such meaningful “repetitions” too.
Situation 4. Almost brothers. Pay attention to the words “signature” and “painting”. They are very close in sound, but do not have the same meaning. Or a couple of words “dress” and “put on.” Such pairs are called paronyms (gr. para - near and onima - name). Explain what the difference is in the following pairs of phrases: “annual leave” and “annual leave”; "neighbor's house" and "neighbor's house". Give 3-4 of your nicknames and give them an explanation.
Situation 5. Unshakable cat. It’s not uncommon to see a stray cat in a store; sometimes she even climbs into the window and sleeps there. Imagine that such a cat cannot be kicked out of the store; it constantly returns and sleeps in the window. Suggest a way to turn harm into benefit.
Situation 6. Caring ants. We are not the only ones who care about preserving nature, in particular trees: on the American continent, “caring” ants live in the cavities of trees. They cultivate the trees they like and help them grow so that the population can live. Explain how ants manage to “grow” trees: after all, unlike people, they cannot go out to plant in an organized manner.
Situation 7. Unfamiliar Internet. Imagine having to explain to natives who have never known civilization what the Internet is. They don't understand your language. Draw the images that would help them understand what the Internet is as accurately as possible.
Situation 8. Consistent nature. In philosophy, as you probably know, the law of unity and struggle of opposites is formulated. According to him, through the struggle of opposing forces, sides, properties, all objects of the world develop, including social systems, man and his spirituality. Depict your understanding of this philosophical law using various objects.
