So back to our London walks Art wander in the Energy and Process wing of Tate Modern.

Arte Povero literally translates as Poor Art.

This doesn’t relate in anyway to the quality of the art that these Italian artists created but rather echoes their core belief that any object or material, no matter how ordinary, how mundane, how everyday, how poor, could and should be used in the creation of an art work.

With Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags we have a perfect example of this.

Ostensibly it shows a figure of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, facing a pile of rags.

It contrasts and combines classical sculpture, as represented by the white statue of Venus, with the modern consumer driven throwaway age.

Interestingly, the statue that Pistoletto used in the original work was very much an emblem of the modern age of mass production for he purchased her from the ornament department of a roadside garden centre!

The rags used in the original 1967 work actually came from Pistoletto’s own studio.

Michaelangelo Pistoletto was known for his Mirror Paintings which, as the name suggests, consisted of paintings painted onto the shiny surfaces of mirrors.

The rags that he used in the original Venus of the Rags were in fact left over rags that were lying around after he had used them to polish the surfaces of the mirrors before painting them.

So having established how the work came to be created and with what, let us now turn our attention to what exactly it is about, what does it mean?

We will begin our analysis of the work in our next blog. In the meantime you can see Tate Modern in all its soaring glory on several of our London walks that wend their way along the banks of the River Thames.