Characteristics of Arte Povera

"Arte Povera - "poor art" or "impoverished art" - was the most significant and influential avant-garde movement to emerge in Europe in the 1960s. It grouped the work of around a dozen Italian artists whose most distinctly recognizable trait was their use of commonplace materials that might evoke a pre-industrial age, such as earth, rocks, clothing, paper and rope. Their work marked a reaction against the modernist abstract painting that had dominated European art in the 1950s, hence much of the group's work is sculptural. But the group also rejected American Minimalism, in particular what they perceived as its enthusiasm for technology. In this respect Arte Povera echoes Post-Minimalist tendencies in American art of the 1960s. But in its opposition to modernism and technology, and its evocations of the past, locality and memory, the movement is distinctly Italian."  http://www.theartstory.org/movement-arte-povera.htm

From the research I have gathered, I have compiled a list of characteristics that make up Arte Povera:

• Commonplace materials
• Pre-Industrial 
• Earth and Elements
• Simple
• Juxtapositions 
• Conceptual
• Assemblage (an art form - "art that is made by assembling disparate elements which are often scavenged by the artist, or sometimes bought specially" - Tate)

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-arte-povera.htm

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/arte-povera.htm