MAMbo’s present collections prove the Galleria d'Arte Moderna’s unrelenting attention to the Italian art scene. A wide array of exhibitions, both in GAM and in Villa delle Rose, has featured as protagonists the main representatives of Arte Povera (Merz, Penone, Calzolari, Anselmo). The work of such artists involved practices aimed at deconstructing the artistic object so as to reveal its energy, its natural forces and prime matter, thus reverting to “pre-logical and pre-iconographical states, to elementary, spontaneous behavior” (G. Celant). This aesthetical and ethical strategy often intertwines with conceptualist poetics leading to the dematerialization of the work of art itself, through the use of language and quotations as a form of art (Boetti, Paolini, Isgrò, Ontani).

The Sixties and Seventies have brought the stirs of political and sexual revolutions, in both cases stressing the presence of the body in the social milieu as well as in artistic research. GAM has played a leading role in the analysis of this aspect with its “Settimana Internazionale della Performance”, which has involved artists such as Abramovic and Ulay, Nitsch and Gina Pane.

As a reaction to the preponderance of extra-artistic means, there has been a subsequent comeback of classic production techniques, which have characterized currents such as Transavanguardia and the Nuovi Nuovi: over the Eighties painting and sculpture are once again in the limelight, way beyond the national scene (Paladino, Cucchi, Scully, Cragg).