Piero Gilardi

Piero Gilardi’s combination of conceptual art with carnivalesque aesthetics produced post-surrealist visions for his self-proclaimed brand of techno-utopian future. Acting in the service of political engagement, his works blend agitprop direct action and ecological restoration. Having played a central role in the leading conceptual movements of the second half of the twentieth-century, along with fellow engaged artists of the Italian and international art worlds, marked by his noted intellectual contribution to Harald Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and Germano Celant’s later Arte Povera exhibitions, the Turinese artist chose to embrace the world on a far wider stage.

For the Artists’ Street, Gilardi will be reinstated in his favorite arena and given “The Greatest Free Show on Earth,” with a carnival-like street procession, setting forth the formidable future-folk characters he convoked for his grand protest parades the world over. Bringing to mind Northern Italy’s own historical and contemporary carnival traditions, as well as the international carnivalesque sensibility of anti-global capitalist or anti-nuclear protests, which he fueled with irreverent portrayals of the powerful, Gilardi’s vision oscillated between a vanishing taste for the grotesque and an avant-garde take on the most progressive political issues.

Having bowed out in 2023 before the advent of the newest despots, Gilardi will leave us wanting for new puppets, big heads, and a whole arsenal of street protest trickery to plot their (at least symbolic) toppling in a world gone topsy-turvy.

Text: Claire Tancons