2024-01-04 19:41:53
On December 18, the artist died in Turin Giovanni Anselmo. Born in 1934 in Borgofranco d’Ivrea, he trained as an architect. Between 1959 and 1964 he cultivated painting and worked as a graphic artist. In 1967 he was one of the artists chosen by Germano Celant for the founding collective of the poor art’, held at the Genoese gallery La Bertesca. In 1969, Harald Szeeman included the Povera, along with conceptualists, and cultivators of Land Art and Body Art, in a collective held at the Kunsthalle of Bern. This chronicler remembers the enormous impact it had on him in the summer of that same year, when he toured the ICA in London, under the title ‘When Attitudes Become Forms’. It was also Szeeman who selected the Italian for the Documenta Kassel 1972. As for Celant, he would return to the matter in exhibitions such as that of the CAPC in Bordeaux in 1982, that of our Velázquez Palace in 1985and that of the Tate in London in 2001.
Turín was the capital of the ‘poor’. Joining Anselmo, they served in the ranks of Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio. Two local gallery owners, Gian Enzo Sperone (who would later open a branch in New York) and Christian Stein, helped them consolidate. As a portraitist they relied above all on Paolo Mussat Sartor.
Photography, precisely, played an important role in Anselmo’s work, as in that of his fellow adventurers. Nature, including the Stromboli, a famous Sicilian volcano, was the scene of many of his actions. The most common materials of his were lstone and cement, although he also handled sand, mirrors, neons, plexiglass, sponges, cables, magnets, pigments (the ultramarine, which he was passionate about), words (but he was not a man of many), the skin of a mole, and even, in his famous “La scultura que mangia” (1968), a lettuce. With all that, he built pieces minimalist, elegant, concise, enigmatic…
He celebrated many exhibitions institutional, for example in the Castello de Rivoli in Turin, the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Tate Modern in London… It was defended by Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, Marian Goodman in New York, Foksal in Warsaw, Jean Bernier in Athens… In 1990, he obtained the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, in the painting mode. Anselmo, whose first Spanish individual was in 1991, in Madrid’s Marga Paz, has work in the La Caixa collection, and, since 1999, a piece (‘Cielo acortado’) on the Isla de las Esculturas in Pontevedra. Three years earlier, she exhibited in the CGAC Santiago, with curatorship of Gloria Mooreits then director, with whom she was now finalizing preparations for her retrospective at the Guggenheim de Bilbao‘Beyond the Horizon’, which will open on February 9, and will then travel to the Bourse du Commerce in Paris.
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