Artists are identified and selected from the national and international scene through cultural associations, organizations, and galleries; they will be hosted at Nellimya Arthouse in Aranno from April to May.
Their work will be documented and included in the annual online catalogue. Schools will be invited to view the “work in progress”, and in summer, creative workshops will be organised, especially for Land Art, to make this artistic discipline known.
There will also be sculptural works to be integrated into the landscape. Nellimya Arthouse will take care of this task: creating the link between the interior of the house with works of Light Art|Arte di Luce, the garden and the surrounding woods.
What is Land Art?
Land Art emerged in the United States in the late 1960s – a term coined by Gerry Schum in 1969 – as an artistic movement that rediscovers nature and landscape as tools and supports, which in turn become sculptures and installations. Among the major authors, we mention Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Walter De Maria and Christo, famous for having completely enveloped large-scale monuments such as the Parliament Building in Berlin, or natural environments, such as a cliff in Australia or his latest intervention, The Floating Piers, on Lake Iseo.
Even in Europe Land Art is a stimulus to artists who, between the 60s and 70s, were experimenting with new ways, such as Process Art and Arte Povera. However, in the Old Continent, it takes on a different character: more intimate, meditative and above all, far from creating works with a macroscopic dimension. Artists prefer gestures, walks and natural materials to create works of Art in Nature, as the European experience will be called. These two artistic movements – born in a social and historical context in which art increasingly played an active social role, prompted by the artists’ desire to engage, denounce, show and make people think – were not just isolated examples with no further developments. In fact, they evolved and turned into other forms of art, thanks also to the ecological and environmental awareness that has been spreading in the western world since the 1980s, mindful of the threats our planet was facing.
In addition to the ones mentioned above, the leading Land Art artists are Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Beverly Pepper, James Turrell but also Robert Morris (in 1966 he designed a large ring of earth covered with grass for an airport, buthe manages to concretize his project Observatory, a complex construction with concentric circles, only in 1971 in Holland) is protagonist of significant environmental operations. The artist Alberto Burri, an Italian painter and sculptor, a leading international figure in post-war art, creates, by covering the rubble of the now destroyed (by an earthquake) city of Gibellina, a famous and admirable example of Land Art that extends for almost 12 hectares, the Grande Cretto.