Luxembourg & Dayan celebrated the semi-centennial of the Arte Povera movement with Contingencies: Arte Povera and After (2017), placing selected works by contemporary artists in dialogue with significant Arte Povera works from the 1960s and '70s, crossing these historical moments to understand the echoes between them. Amid the sociopolitical upheavals of the day, Arte Povera artists questioned the established languages of government, industry, and culture by proclaiming the porosity of the artwork and exalting in its contingency; suddenly, a potential chemical reaction or simple transfer of energy could comprise the work itself. Contingencies considered how artists today similarly react to a world in turmoil by rejecting the autonomy of the art object to harness, engage, or interrupt systemic flows—whether organic, social, or technological—on a distinctly material level.

If Arte Povera emerged as a critique of the postwar push toward globalization—and its aesthetic expression through American Pop art—the work of these artists similarly bristles against the smooth, seemingly immaterial dissemination of capital, information, and images within our present global order. These contemporary artists launched their critique on a material register. As with Arte Povera, these works enact tensions between continuity and disjuncture, between interconnectivity on the one hand and the inevitability of energy lost and connections missed on the other. And though the materials employed are not always "poor," they are certainly self-effacing-often breaking down or verging on something else.

The exhibition featured historical works by Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali, and Michelangelo Pistoletto placed in conversation with contemporary works by Olga Balema, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Nina Canell, Jason Loebs, and Carlos Reyes.