Germano Celant (b. Genoa, 1940) is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, who coined the term "Arte Povera" (poor art) in 1967 and wrote many articles and books on the subject.

Celant attended the University of Genoa, where he studied history of art with Eugenio Battisti. In 1967, his manifesto of Arte Povera, Notes for a Guerilla, was published in Flash Art. The concept of Arte Povera seemed to be that in Italy art was quite different from the America due to the different circumstances at the time. Italy was going through an industrial period but was not really making the pop art that coincided with the established economy as opposed to American artists like Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and other pop artists. The Italian artists were going for a neo-humanism in their art and not for the coolness and calculated machine-made imagery of the pop artists.

"Arte Povera" was essentially formed around two nucleus: one in Turin, with artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, and Piero Gilardi; and one in Rome, with Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. Celant went on to organize Arte Povera exhibitions at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa (1967), Galleria De' Foscherari in Bologna (1968), and a three-day performance event called "Arte Povera & Azioni Povere at Amalfi" (1968).

Marisa Merz (b. 1931 in Turin, Italy) is an Italian sculptor, widow of artist Mario Merz. She now lives in Milan.

Marisa Merz was born in Turin, Italy in 1931. In the 1950s she met Mario Merz who was studying there, and they later got married. They have a daughter, Beatriz (Bea) Merz.

In 2001 she was awarded the Biennale di Venezia Award for lifetime achievement.

In 1967, for her first solo exhibition, Marisa made a folded aluminium foil installation. She was also one of the people involved in the Arte Povera + Azione Povera exhibition the following year in Amalfi. Although in the 1970s she didn't have exhibitions often, in 1970 she had her second solo exhibition in Rome. This exhibition featured installations made by using knitted copper, under the title of Ad occhi chiusi gli occhi sono straordinariamente aperti ('To closed eyes, the eyes are extraordinarily open').

Her work displays many of the fundamental issues wiith which Arte Povera artists are preoccupied, such as organic forms, focus on subjectivity, the use of lower forms of art, such as the crafts, and the relationship between art and life. Marisa's work has been described as lyrical, subtle, visionary and private.

Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.

In 1963, the artist introduced found objects in his paintings, among them live animals but also fire, earth, burlap sacks, gold. He replaced the canvas with bed frames, doorways, windows or simply the gallery itself. In 1967, Kounellis joined the Arte Povera movement of Germano Celant. In 1969, he exhibited real horses in the galleria l’Attico. Gradually, Kounellis introduced new materials in his installations (propane torches, smoke, coal, meat, ground coffee, lead, found wooden objects, etc.). The gallery environment was replaced with historical (mostly industrial) sites.

October 2009 finds many Kounellis' works presented in various sections of Tate Modern Gallery in London, UK. On the 5th floor, there is a room dedicated to his work. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian newspaper notes : "dry-stone walling, sacks of grain and rice, and a painting that includes part of the score of St John Passion by JS Bach bring a sense of real life, organic and ancient, into the museum. Like the Kiefer installation, this is another of the Artist Rooms acquired from the collection of Anthony d'Offay." On the 3rd floor, one of his works is matched with that of an Italian artist of the same artistic movement.

Born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942, Dan Graham grew up in New Jersey. In 1964 he began directing the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he put on Sol LeWitt's first one-man show, and in groups shows, exhibited works of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson. Like these artists, Graham considered himself a writer-artist, publishing essays and reviews on rock music, Eisenhower's paintings, and Dean Martin's television show. His earliest work dealt with the magazine page, predating but often associated with Conceptual art. His work often focuses on cultural phenomena, and incorporates photography, video, performance, glass and mirror structures. He has exhibited and realized commissions all around the world, including participation at numerous international group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1976, 2003, 2004 and 2005) and documenta V, VI, VII, IX and X (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992 and 1997). Major retrospectives of his oeuvre have been staged in Europe (2001–02) and in the U.S. (2009), showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Dan Graham lives and works in New York.

Marc Quinn (born 8 January 1964) is a British artist and one of a loose group known as the Young British Artists. He is known for Alison Lapper Pregnant (a sculpture of Alison Lapper which has been installed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square), Self (a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood), and Garden (2000).

Quinn has used blood, ice and faeces to make sculptures; his work sometimes refers to scientific developments. Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual.

Quinn was born in London in 1964. He studied history and the history of art at Robinson College, Cambridge. He worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barry Flanagan.^{[citation needed]} Quinn began to exhibit in the early 1990s. He was the first artist represented by Jay Jopling, and was exhibited in Charles Saatchi's Sensation.

Quinn has exhibited exhibitions including Sonsbeek ’93, Arnhem (1993), Give and Take, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2001), Statements 7, 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Gwangju Biennale (2004). Solo exhibitions include Tate Gallery, London (1995), Kunstverein Hannover (1999), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), Tate Liverpool (2002), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004), Groninger Museum, Groningen (2006) and MACRO, Rome (2006), DHC/ART Fondation pour l’art contemporain, Montréal (2007) and Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2009).