ART CITIES:Athens-Giovanni Anselmo
Today one of Italy’s most internationally acclaimed artists, Giovanni Anselmo first emerged as part of the Arte Povera Movement during the second half of the ‘60s. Working mainly as a sculptor, but also with photography and drawing and using mixed media including metal, plastic, water, stone and even perishable foods, Anselmo’s work is highly Conceptual and will require constant “feeding” due to many of the perishable and tenuous elements he employs in his work.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bernier/Eliades Gallery Archive
Giovanni Anselmo’s solo exhibition is on presentation at Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens. It was while walking on Mount Stromboli at dawn in 1965 that Giovanni Anselmo was suddenly struck by the realization that he was merely a tiny detail in the vast continuum of universal energy. This epiphany was to inspire his many works investigating the finite and the infinite, the microcosm and the macrocosm, and the elemental laws and forces of nature – gravity, tension, magnetism and energy. A wide range of organic and inorganic materials including vegetables, water, electricity, granite, iron and plastic are brought together in combinations that strikingly demonstrate these forces. Anselmo’s monolithic installations are precarious and imposing, while a more gentle side is also revealed in works involving a variety of media, including photography and steel. As in each of his exhibitions, Anselmo employs a compass to precisely choreograph and orientate each of the fragments of granite in the direction of the energy of the North Magnetic Pole. Giovanni Anselmo first 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. 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. 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. The Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna (MamBo) held in 2006 a wide-ranging anthological exhibition conceived by the artist as a total work.
Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Duration: 17/5-10/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue.-Fri: 10:30-18:30, Sat: 12:00-16:00, www.bernier-eliades.gr
