Piero Gilardi

Piero Gilardi was born in Turin on 3 August 1942 to a Swiss family. He studied at the Liceo Artistico in Turin, where he met Michelangelo Pistoletto, and went on to further art studies at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, though the exact years of that training are not documented in available sources.

He held his first solo exhibition, Machines for the Future, at Galleria Notizie in Turin in 1963. In 1965 he began the Tappeti-Natura, floor works that reconstruct natural landscapes in polyurethane foam, vinyl resin, and rubber latex. The series brought him rapid international attention: in 1967 he showed with Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, Galerie Zwirner in Cologne, and Galleria Sperone in Milan, and, on the recommendation of critic Lucy Lippard, at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. Through this period he was, in the words used consistently across gallery and museum biographies, a catalytic figure in the Arte Povera movement as it coalesced in Turin.

In the 1990s Gilardi turned to interactive multimedia installation, and in 2008 he founded Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), a park for living art in Turin devoted to ecological and participatory art practice. He remained based in Turin, continuing to make work and to write and speak on art and environmental politics, into his final years. He died in Turin on 5 March 2023, at the age of eighty.

Gilardi is treated in museum and gallery literature as one of the initiators of Arte Povera, and his Nature Carpets are consistently read as an early and influential move toward bringing an "artificial nature" into the gallery space. That standing was reaffirmed late in his life by Nature Forever, a survey exhibition at MAXXI in Rome in 2017, and reinforced posthumously by Foam Rubber Revolution at ChertLuedde in Berlin in 2024, curated by Marco Scotini, which placed the Nature Carpets alongside his political actions and correspondence with the critic Tommaso Trini. Obituaries in Artforum, The Guardian, and ARTnews all foreground the same throughline: an artist who moved from Arte Povera sculpture into decades of ecological and social activism, culminating in his founding of Parco Arte Vivente in Turin in 2008.

Gilardi's confirmed auction record is EUR 136,500, paid for Sassi (1967) at Dorotheum in Vienna on 29 November 2023, a sale reported in the Italian art press as a new auction record for the artist. Below that peak, the great majority of his works at auction, mostly early foam sculptures, later multiples, and jewelry-scale pieces, sell for a few thousand to under twenty thousand euros at Italian houses such as Aste Bolaffi and Ambrosiana Casa d'Aste. The market is small and concentrated in Italy and Austria, reflecting an artist whose reputation rests primarily on museum recognition rather than a deep or geographically broad secondary market.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Gilardi. Verification runs through Galerie Michel Rein, which confirmed his death and continues to present his work, and through the Fondazione Centro Studi Piero Gilardi, which serves as an archive and has lent works to institutions including Castello di Rivoli. Because his public auction history is thin and concentrated at modest price points outside the single 2023 record, provenance and period matter a great deal: early 1960s foam works and the original Tappeti-Natura carry the most historical weight, while later multiples and decorative pieces trade at a different level. Collectors should treat any single result, including the 2023 record, as a data point from a small and still-developing market rather than a stable trend line.