Gianni Piacentino

While elegant weirdness may sound oxymoronic, this Italian artist achieved something like it, at least in his later work. As one of the founders of Arte Povera in the mid-1960s, his specialty was extremely reductive sculptures, calling to mind line drawings in three dimensions. Within a few years, these bulked up to recall furniture, but by the end of in the decade, Piacentino shifted his focus to oddly attenuated or disarticulated forms that referenced flight (things like propellors or the wings from the Wright Brother’s flyer) and motor racing (soap-box derby cars, or those bullet-shaped vehicles used to set land-speed records). Eccentrically beautiful, Piacentino’s objects hearken back Italian Futurism’s early 20th-century obsession with automobiles and airplanes.