Giovanni Anselmo

 

 

Born on 5 August 1934 at Borgofranco d’Ivrea. From 1954 to 1964 he devoted himself to painting, but in 1965 he turned to the creation of objects inspired by observation of natural events and energies, which he exhibited in 1967 at the Galleria Sperone in Turin. In 1968 he joined the Arte Povera movement, embodying actions or ideas through combinations of contrasting and opposed materials, whose weight, gravity and vigour he explored. So in Untitled (also known as Scultura che mangia, 1968, Musée National d'Art Moderne-Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), he presented a lettuce pressed between two squared blocks of granite; in Torsione (1968) the skin of an animal is sunk in a concrete block and twisted around a wooden stick. In 1972 he turned to words and their immateriality to explore the relationship between abstract categories of thought, such as general and particular, finite and infinite, culture and nature, the passing of historical time and the hypothesis of the eternity of universal physical laws, the routine of experience and the abstraction of philosophical principles (Detail). One of these works was presented in 1979 in the exhibition Le Stanze curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at the Castello Colonna di Genazzano (Oltremare a nord e il paesaggio ad est). He took part in Documenta 5 and 7, organized at Kassel in 1972 and in 1982. In 1990 he was awarded the Leone d’Oro for painting at the 44th Venice Biennale. His striving for a universal energy and an idea of infinity led the artist to represent actions of approach and communication between different realities in sculptures which express a compressed force, blocked “at the limit”, at a moment of balance. Energia per non morire is the title of the installation produced in 1996 at San Gimignano for the first edition of the survey Arte all'Arte: it consisted of two large squared stone forms suspended by a rope from a balcony. In 2006 he produced Direzione, consisting of a "boulder" to which a magnetic needle was applied, for the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna (MamBo), which in the same year held a wide-ranging anthological exhibition conceived by the artist as a total work. He lives and works in Turin and on the island of Stromboli.