Rome (AFP)

The Italian art critic Germano Celant, inventor of the term "Arte Povera" to designate a prolific movement on the international art scene, died Wednesday in Milan at 80 years of the consequences of the coronavirus.

"The world of culture and creation mourns the disappearance of another of its great actors. Germano Celant, art critic and exhibition curator to whom we owe one of the most fertile Italian avant-garde of the XXth century, leaves an impoverished Italy without its genius and its talent ", reacted the Italian Minister for Culture Dario Franceschini.

Germano Celant was one of the greatest art critics from the 1970s. He is responsible for having coined the world-famous term "Arte Povera" ("Poor Art"), to designate a group of Italian artists who have chosen to use an innovative and poetic language using natural materials and elements, thus posing as an alternative to minimalist and conceptual schools.

"Celant will go down in history for the concept of Arte Povera," responded architect and urban planner Stefano Boeri, director of the Milan Triennale, a major cultural site in the Lombard capital. "In the 1960s, when he was very young, he observed artists working with very simple materials and producing works with high conceptual value".

"Arte Povera then became one of the greatest artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century," he concludes.

Among the protagonists of this movement are notably Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Penone, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali.

During his long career, Germano Celant organized exhibitions for a number of international cultural institutions including the Guggenheim in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Pinault Foundation in Venice. He also directed the Venice Art Biennial in 1997.

Since 1995, Germano Celant has been associated with the Prada Foundation, a cultural institution based in Milan and Venice and financed by the famous luxury brand, where he had organized around forty exhibitions, including a retrospective of Jannis Kounellis in 2019.

"We are very saddened by the death of a friend and a traveling companion," reacted the presidents of the Foundation, Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli.

© 2020 AFP