The Italian curator Francesco Bonami is organizing an auction of Italian art at Phillips New York on April 28. Around 50 works created over the past 100 years are due to go under the hammer, but Arte Povera, one of the best-known movements to come out of the country in the past century, will not take centre stage. Instead, Bonami will focus on less well-known artists, in a similar vein to the exhibition he organized at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2008, “Italics,” which shifted the focus from Arte Povera and Transavanguardia artists to those who had been side-lined by traditional readings of Modern and contemporary Italian art. “The idea is to open up the view of Italian art beyond the household names,” Bonami says.
