"Pascali saw the art gallery as a kind of church and the artist as the person who used its pulpits and altars. Without the gallery the artist was just another craftsman. The point was not to destroy art a la Dada but to continuously reinvent its forms."
Woven steel wool mimes and subverts the material identity of Pino Pascali’s Tappeto, or Rug, which captures the spirit and surreality of the artist’s fantastical sculpture oeuvre. Born in 1935, Pascali is celebrated as one of the most important and influential members of the Arte Povera movement, best known for reconciling his imaginative playfulness with a critically minded and intellectually charged conceptual heft. Whether his “fake sculptures”—shaped, often wall-mounted canvases made to evoke animals or plants—or his “weapons,” which infantilize forms of daunting machinery by rendering them inert, ineffective, and comically large, Pascali infused not only the Arte Povera movement but postwar art at large with a psychological levity and theoretical gravity.
Tappeto relates to the larger series which featured at the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968 and is further distinguished for its relationship to Tela di Penelope, which is held in the collects ion of the Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome. Pascali is presently the subject of renewed institutional consideration following the seminal 2024 retrospective of his work at the Fondazione Prada, Milan and his inclusion in the 2024-25 Arte Povera exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault collects ion, Paris. Coming from the personal collects ion of trailblazing gallerist, dealer, and collects or Daniella Luxembourg, Tappeto is an extraordinary and rare example from Pascali’s limited oeuvre, examples of which reside in international museum collects ions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
