Giovanni Anselmo (1934)
Italy
Biography :
Self-taught painter, Giovanni Anselmo decided to abandon traditional artistic languages very early following the creation of a photograph entitled My shadow projected towards infinity at the summit of Stromboli at sunrise, taken on August 16, 1965. He declared to this remark: “My own person entered, through the intermediary of the invisible shadow, into relationship with the light, with the infinite”. Giovanni Anselmo has participated in all the collective exhibitions of Arte Povera, and has also had the honor of personal exhibitions in museums such as the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris ( 1985) or at the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels (2002). He also represented Italy at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990.
Thanks to this experience which served as a revelation to him, in 1967 he began to participate in the activities of Arte Povera, a movement to which his practice is now inevitably linked. His first sculptures, exhibited at the Galleria Sperone in Turin in 1967, were made of iron bar and painted polystyrene and are based on a concept of energy, because it involves a balance and tension between various elements. His work gradually incorporates natural materials (stone, wood, iron) which he combines with plant materials (sponge, lettuce, etc.), relying as much on their intrinsic natural qualities as on their symbolic charge. The artist proceeds by creating tension between associations of antagonistic materials and masses. One of his most iconic works, Senso titolo (Struttura che mangia) [Structure that eats] from 1968, is composed of two massive blocks of granite, copper wire and a lettuce; poetic tension between the idea of eternity and that of an organic life condemned to withering and disappearance. The assembly falls apart when the lettuce irreparably wilts, indicating that the work exists in “real” life. His reflection focuses on the order of things, the cycles of nature and more generally on the existential relationship between man and nature within the cosmos. In the 1970s, Anselmo replaced matter with words, which could have brought him closer to the investigations into art and language carried out during this period by representatives of conceptual art on the other side of the world. 'Atlantic. However, his work differs widely from the linguistic and tautological works of the conceptualists, preferring to focus on the boundaries between real and virtual. In Infinito (1971), the artist projects the word “infinito” on a wall on which it cannot be read. Indeed, to read this word, you have to “go” to the point located at infinity. Since the 1980s, Anselmo has developed a series devoted to the concept of Oltremare [Outresea], where his works seem to designate an elsewhere beyond the framework of art, like an extension of some of his seminal works, such as Direction (1968), based on the idea of orientation and suggestion of a territory beyond the framework of art.