Giovanni Anselmo Infinito

cm 162 x 102

After having abandoned painting, which had engaged him from 1959 to 1964, Giovanni Anselmo became a successful protagonist of Arte Povera in the second half of the 1960s. Anselmo’s studies elaborated the dialectic between visible and invisible, using industrial and natural elements such as minerals and plants, based on the physical characteristics of the materials. From 1969, the artist produced a series of works that relied on photography. In Infinito, the artist adopted the photographic tool, forcing its structural limits and annulling the temporality of the shot. The work is a monochromatic photograph, a blue surface where there is no trace of space or time: “a photograph of infinity through the sky,” as the subtitle reads. As in the case of the tiny compasses or spirit levels that often appear in the artist’s installations, the photographic tool, facing the infinite existence of the elements, becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of any representation. For Anselmo, oltremare is a signpost for another place that will never be definitively accessible. Oltremare conjures up the Orient, merchants who imported lapis lazuli, which was indispensable for producing the color ultramarine (oltremare in Italian), or the ancient tradition that saw a bit of starry sky in the stone, a gift of the gods to mankind.

No

B. Merz (ed.), Giovanni Anselmo, exhibition catalogue (Modena, Galleria d’Arte Moderna – Palazzina dei Giardini Pubblici), Turin 1989 G. Moure, B. Corà (eds.), Giovanni Anselmo, exhibition catalogue (Santiago de Compostela, Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea), Santiago de Compostela 1995 A. Palopoli, Giovanni Anselmo, in P. Colombo, M. Pignatti Morano, S. Vannini, S. Freddo, S. Borsato (eds.), Le Collezioni. Acquisizioni di arte contemporanea. MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, exhibition catalogue (Rome, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Turin 2003, pp. 16-17; 64 A. Viliani, Torino 15 giugno 2006. In conversazione , in G. Maraniello, A. Viliani (eds.), Giovanni Anselmo, exhibition catalogue (Bologna, MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna), Turin 2007, pp. 220-221 C. Christov-Bakargiev, M. Beccaria (eds.), Giovanni Anselmo, exhibition catalogue (Rivoli, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea), Milan 2016

Acquisition

Photography