Reality or artificiality? Pino Pascali at the Camden Arts Centre

Pino Pascali's final works were also his most crucial and influential. The Italian artist, who died in late 1968, had just presented his work in a solo show at the XXXIV Venice Biennale, and the Camden Arts Centre is now hosting the first UK exhibition dedicated to Pascali's work (until 1 May).

Entitled '...a multitude of soap bubbles which explode from time to time...': Pino Pascali's final works 1967-1968, the show presents a series of works from the 1968 Biennale and takes a poignant and compelling look at the key Arte Povera artist who died at the peak of his career.

In 1967 the Italian critic Germano Celant coined the term Arte Povera, meaning 'poor art', to denote the group of 13 radical artists working in Italy in the late 1960s. These artists used everyday, natural and fragile materials to explore the relationship between art and life. Form and material were engaged in a celebration of a more rural, pre-industrial and non-materialistic world, which resulted in artworks that were simultaneously playful yet serious, exaggerated yet intensely real.

Pascali's work on show in Camden is typical of Arte Povera's artistic principles; his giant blue widow spider, Vedova blu (1968), invades the viewer's space and confronts us with our own mortality, whilst his combination of ephemeral, natural and man-made materials such as wood, straw, galvanised aluminium, steel wood and acrylic plush create an interesting dialogue between past and present worlds.

'The essential thing is that they give me strength, they demonstrate that I exist,' Pascali said of his work, which has an alchemical power to transform raw material into mythical, powerful objects.

Follow the link to Fad for details of the exhibition, and to Aesthetica for a review.